Kinetics Analysis on Chemical Reactions of Hydrocarbon Fuel Based on Computer Simulation

Abstract

Hydrocarbon fuel is one of the most heavily used fuels. To optimize the engine performance and realize efficient use of hydrocarbon fuel, it is very meaningful to probe into the combustion mechanism of hydrocarbon fuel in the engine and examine the kinetics principles of the fuel in chemical reactions. In this paper, the chemical kinetics of hydrocarbon fuel was explored with the software CHEMKIN. The author constructed a kinetics model for methane in chemical reactions, and analyzed the main paths of chemical reactions in methane combustion. In addition, the elementary reactions in methane combustion were screened through sensitivity analysis, which focuses on the impacts of the methane concentration, air ratio and combustion products on the sensitivity features of the chemical reaction kinetics model. In this way, the main elementary reactions of methane combustion and the main components of the chemical reaction kinetics model were identified. The comparison between simulated and measured values show that the two values shared a similar trend, indicating that our simplified chemical reaction kinetics model can fulfill the requirements for practical application. The proposed method can be adopted for the numerical simulation of hydrocarbon fuel combustion in the engine.