Laminar burning velocities at elevated pressures for gasoline and gasoline surrogates associated with RON

The development and validation of a new gasoline surrogate using laminar flame speed as a target parameter is presented. Laminar burning velocities were measured using a constant-volume spherical vessel with ignition at the center of the vessel. Tested fuels included iso-octane, n-heptane, toluene, various mixtures of primary reference fuels (PRFs) and toluene reference fuels (TRFs) and three gasoline fuels of 70, 85 and 95 RON (FACE J, C and F) at the initial temperature of 358 K and pressures up to 0.6 MPa in the equivalence ratio ranging from 0.8 to 1.6. Normalized laminar burning velocity data were mapped into a tri-component mixture space at different experimental conditions to allocate different gasoline surrogates for different gasoline fuels, having RON of 70, 85 and 95. The surrogates of TRF-70-4 (17.94% iso-C8H18 + 42.06% n-C7H16 + 40% C7H8), TRF-85-1 (77.4% iso-C8H18 + 17.6% n-C7H16 + 5% C7H8), and TRF-95-1 (88.47% iso-C8H18 + 6.53% n-C7H16 + 5% C7H8) of RON 70, 85 and 95, respectively, are shown to successfully emulate the burning rate characteristics of the gasoline fuels associated with these RONs under the various experimental conditions investigated. An empirical correlation was derived to obtain laminar burning velocities at pressures that are experimentally unattainable as high as 3.0 MPa. Laminar burning velocities were comparable to the simulated values for lean and stoichiometric flames but they were relatively higher than the simulated values for rich flames. A flame instability assessment was conducted by determining Markstein length, critical Pecklet number, and critical Karlovitz number at the onset of flame instability.