Gas-phase saturation and evaporative cooling effects during wet compression of a fuel aerosol under RCM conditions

Wet compression of a fuel aerosol has been proposed as a means of creating gas-phase mixtures of involatile diesel-representative fuels and oxidizer + diluent gases for rapid compression machine (RCM) experiments. The use of high concentration aerosols (e.g., ∼0.1 mLfuel/Lgas, ∼1 × 109 droplets/Lgas for stoichiometric fuel loading at ambient conditions) can result in droplet–droplet interactions which lead to significant gas-phase fuel saturation and evaporative cooling during the volumetric compression process. In addition, localized stratification (i.e., on the droplet scale) of the fuel vapor and of temperature can lead to non-homogeneous reaction and heat release processes – features which could prevent adequate segregation of the underlying chemical kinetic rates from rates of physical transport. These characteristics are dependent on many factors including physical parameters such as overall fuel loading and initial droplet size relative to the compression rate, as well as fuel and diluent properties such as the boiling curve, vaporization enthalpy, heat capacity, and mass and thermal diffusivities. This study investigates the physical issues, especially fuel saturation and evaporative cooling effects, using a spherically-symmetric, single-droplet wet compression model. n-Dodecane is used as the fuel with the gas containing 21% O2 and 79% N2. An overall compression time and compression ratio of 15.3 ms and 13.4 are used, respectively. It is found that smaller droplets (d0 ∼ 2–3 μm) are more affected by ‘far-field’ saturation and cooling effects, while larger droplets (d0 ∼ 14 μm) result in greater localized stratification of the gas-phase due to the larger diffusion distances for heat and mass transport. Vaporization of larger droplets is more affected by the volumetric compression process since evaporation requires more time to be completed even at the same overall fuel loading. All of the cases explored here yield greater compositional stratification than thermal stratification due to the high Lewis numbers of the fuel–air mixtures (Leg ∼ 3.8).