A small detailed chemical-kinetic mechanism for hydrocarbon combustion

A chemical-kinetic mechanism is presented that is designed to be used for autoignition, deflagrations, detonations, and diffusion flames of a number of different fuels. To keep the mechanism small, attention is restricted to pressures below about 100 atm, temperatures above about 1000 K, and equivalence ratios less than about 3 for the premixed systems, thereby excluding soot formation and low-temperature fuel–peroxide chemistry. Under these restrictions, hydrogen combustion is included with 21 steps among 8 chemical species, combustion of carbon monoxide with 30 steps among 11 species, methane, methanol, ethane, ethylene, and acetylene combustion with 134 steps among 30 species, and propane, propene, allene, and propyne combustion with 177 steps among 37 species. The mechanism has been extensively tested previously for all of these fuels except propane, propene, allene, and propyne. Tests are reported here for these last four fuels through comparisons with experiments and with predictions of other mechanisms for deflagration velocities and shock-tube ignition.