A FORTRAN program for calculating the thermodynamic and transport properties of diesel fuel

Advanced models of the thermodynamic processes in internal combustion engines require the exact estimation of the thermodynamic and transport properties of combustion reactants and products. Although many works have been reported on the properties of air, fuel vapour and combustion products, a study on the properties of the fuel liquid phase seems to be lacking in the open literature. These properties are very important for simulating the fuel droplet evaporation process, which plays an important role on diesel engine combustion and emitted pollutant modelling. In the present work the values of the thermodynamic and transport properties of liquid diesel fuel are computed, as a function of pressure and temperature, by polynomial fitting against available experimental data. This is accomplished in a fraction of a second when using a personal computer with a very small error. N-Dodecane is treated in the present study, which forms a representative fuel of the diesel fuel in most diesel engine cycle simulations. The relevant computer program subroutines are given in an educational form, in FORTRAN-77 language.