Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Fuel
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h i g h l i g h t s
Liquid penetration length of n-butanol is less affected by the downstream ame.
Flame propagation and distribution of n-butanol is less sensitive to temperature.
Biodiesel soot concentrates on the reacting spray jet and near wall region.
The soot of n-butanol is very low and concentrates on reacting spray at 900 K and 1000 K.
B50D50 soot is lower 2030% than biodiesel at the same fuel oxygen content.
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 7 January 2014
Received in revised form 18 March 2014
Accepted 14 May 2014
Available online 29 May 2014
Keywords:
n-Butanol
Soybean biodiesel
Constant volume chamber
Quantitative high time-resolved soot
measurement
Low temperature combustion
a b s t r a c t
The spray, ame natural luminosity and soot quantitative measurement by fueling n-butanol and soybean
biodiesel were investigated on a constant volume chamber using multi laser diagnostics with high temporal
resolution of 15,037 frames per second. The ambient temperature ranged from 700 K to 1000 K was applied
to mimic the diesel in-cylinder environment covering both conventional and low temperature combustion
conditions. Results demonstrate that the transient liquid penetration lengths gradually decrease with the
development of injection in a burning spray. The transient liquid penetration length of n-butanol is less
affected by the downstream ame and is shorter than that of biodiesel under similar conditions. The two
fuels also present drastically different ame dynamics and emission characteristics during the combustion
process. n-Butanol displays higher normalized combustion pressure indicating higher potential thermal
efciency. The ame can be observed at reacting spray jet and near wall region for biodiesel, while the main
n-butanol ame is concentrated on reacting spray jet. Compared to biodiesel, the ame luminosity of
n-butanol is lower and its propagation and distribution is less sensitive to ambient temperatures. Ambient
temperature is conrmed as the dominant impact on the soot emissions as the net soot increases for both
tested fuels with elevated ambient temperature. No soot emission is detected for either n-butanol or biodiesel at low ambient temperature of 700 K. The soot starts to appear at both downstream of the jet and near
wall regions from 800 K for biodiesel whereas the soot do not emerge until 900 K for n-butanol. The soot
concentration of n-butanol is also much lower and restricted within the downstream of the spray jet even
at high ambient temperatures. A particular interesting observation is that the normalized time integrated
soot mass for B50D50 (50% n-butanol and 50% low-sulfur diesel fuel in volume) is 2030% lower than that of
neat biodiesel fuel at different ambient temperatures even though the oxygen content in both fuels is nearly
the same. The higher soot formation for biodiesel is explained by the fact that fuel-bound oxygen is less
effective in reducing soot production and that higher viscosity and boiling point results in more local high
equivalence-ratio region in mixing process. In this regard, n-butanol is more effective in suppressing the
soot formation and shows stronger soot reduction capability than that of biodiesel.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Corresponding authors at: State Key Laboratory of Engines, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China. Tel.: +86 22 27406832; fax: +86 22 27383362 (M. Yao), Department
of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA. Tel.: +1 217 3335879; fax: +1 217 2446534 (C.-f. F. Lee).
E-mail addresses: y_mingfa@tju.edu.cn (M. Yao), cee@illinois.edu (C.-f. F. Lee).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2014.05.038
0016-2361/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
318
1. Introduction
Bio-fuels have received increasing scientic and public attention due to the fact that they can reduce greenhouse gas emissions
and increase energy security and diversity. Among amounts of biofuels, biodiesel is the primary alternative fuel for diesel engines
because biodiesel properties are similar to the diesel fuel. Some
previous studies have shown that an engine fuelled with biodiesel
can reduce emissions of total hydrocarbons (THC), carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter. However, there is slightly increase
in brake specic fuel consumption and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions [19]. On the other hand, n-butanol is a very competitive
alternative to be applied in diesel engines and is getting popular
recently. Like ethanol, n-butanol is a biomass based renewable fuel
that can be produced by alcoholic fermentation of the biomass
feedstocks [10]. Fuel properties indicate that n-butanol has the
potential to overcome the drawbacks brought by ethanol in several
aspects, i.e. higher heating value, good intersolubility with diesel,
higher viscosity resulting in less wear problems, no corrosion to
the existing pipelines. Compared with biodiesel, n-butanol contains more oxygen content indicating stronger ability on soot
reduction. The viscosity of n-butanol is close to diesel fuel, while
biodiesel has relatively higher viscosity than diesel fuel, and thus
n-butanol is more suitable for diesel engine compared to biodiesel.
Some previous studies have shown that an engine fuelled with nbutanol can reduce emissions of soot, NOx and CO but slightly
increase brake specic fuel consumption and THC emissions, while
the thermal efciency increases slightly compared with diesel fuel
[1117].
Although many studies have been conducted on effects of biodiesel and n-butanol on combustion and emissions, these studies
are usually carried out on engine benches and focus on engine performance rather than on the fundamental aspects such as the
spray, ame development and soot distribution. It is difcult to
isolate the effects of basic parameters (e.g., in-cylinder gas temperature or pressure) associated with the combustion and soot formation based only on the engine tests. Meanwhile, the constant
volume chamber is often used to create well-characterized ambient environment for diesel spray combustion and has also been
used for biodiesel research in a number of studies. Wang et al.
[18,19] reported the spray, ame, and soot characteristics of biodiesels in a constant volume combustion chamber with different
injection pressures. The ambient temperature and pressure were
set to 885 K and 4 MPa to simulate the typical thermodynamic
condition in diesel engines. Nerva et al. [20] investigated the physical and chemical inuences of biodiesel on spray mixing, ignition,
combustion and soot formation in a constant volume chamber by
using a range of optical diagnostics at 900 K and 1000 K ambient
temperatures. These ambient conditions are typically encountered
in conventional combustion mode. Recently, Zhang et al. [21,22]
investigated the biodiesel spray combustion in a constant volume
chamber at lower ambient temperature of 800 K. In our previous
study [23], the combustion and soot emissions of n-butanol and
soybean biodiesel have been measured in a constant volume
chamber at different oxygen concentrations at 800 K and 1000 K.
However, 800 K is still not sufciently low to characterize the earlyinjection conditions in premixed charge compression ignition
(PCCI) and low temperature combustion (LTC). Literature survey
suggests little studies have been conducted regarding the biodiesel
combustion at ambient temperature lower than 800 K. It should
also be mentioned that soot emissions were not directly measured
in a burning spray plume in most of the aforementioned studies by
using two color thermometry [18,19,21,22]. Nerva et al. [20]
applied laser induced incandescence for soot measurement, yet
yielded low temporal resolutions for revealing the detailed soot
formation/oxidation mechanisms. In this respective, quantitative
319
Properties
Ethanol
n-Butanol
Diesel (ASTM)
Molecular formula
Cetane number
Oxygen content (wt.%)
Density (g/ml) at 20 C
Autoignition temperature (C)
Flash point (C) at closed cup
Lower heating value (MJ/kg)
Boiling point (C)
Stoichiometric ratio
Latent heating (25 C kJ/kg)
Viscosity (mm2/s) at 40 C
Surface tension (N/m) at 20 C
C2H5OH
8
34.8
0.790
434
8
26.8
78.4
9.02
904
1.08
22.32
C4H9OH
25
21.6
0.81
385
35
33.1
117.7
11.21
582
2.63
24.6
CH3OOCR
51 (D 613)
10
0.887 (D 1298) at 15 C
363
173.9 (D 93)
37.53 (D 240)
342a (D 1160)
12.5
200
4.0 (D 445)
34.4
C12AC25
47.1
0
0.837
210
6588
42.5
180370
14.3
270
2.42
31.4
Note: The boiling point for soybean biodiesel is the distillation temperature 90% recovered.
The forward illumination light extinction (FILE) method developed and veried by Xu and Lee [29] was adopted to provide high
time-resolved quantitative information on the spatial and temporal distributions of soot. The FILE measurement has been successfully applied to the constant volume chamber to study transient
combustion, and yielded new insights in soot formation and
oxidation for diesel and other alternative fuels [2834]. The
current incident light for soot measurement was supplied by a
copper vapor laser (Oxford Lasers LS20-50), which has a pulse
repetitive frequency from 4.5 kHz to 20 kHz and each pulse lasts
2530 ns. The high speed camera (Phantom V7.1) with a 105 mm
focal length lens (Nikkor) was located above the chamber. The
camera and the laser were synchronized up to 15,037 frames per
second to produce high time-resolved measurement at resolution
of 256 256 pixels. The detailed setup for the soot measurement
can be found in previous studies [33,34].
Mie-scattering technique was adopted to study liquid jet penetration with the spray combustion. The set-up of liquid jet was the
same as FILE setup except there was no light diffuser behind the
jet. The interference lters were used to block the visible soot
luminosities to ensure only Mie scattering from liquid jet was
recorded. For the natural ame luminosity measurement, the diffuser and interference lters were removed and the laser light
was shut down. Flame images were directly obtained by the
camera with the same of time-resolved measurement as FILE.
The camera was triggered by the injection signal and the exposure
time for each frame was 3 ls.
3. Results and discussions
3.1. Spray liquid penetration length
Fig. 1 presents the evolution of liquid jet penetration using
n-butanol and biodiesel at different ambient temperatures. The
transient liquid penetration length is dened as the distance
between the injector orice and the pixel with intensity rst falling
below the preset threshold along the centerline of the liquid jet.
The similar method has been widely used in previous studies
[2,3,3537]. To reduce the cycle-to-cycle variation, the liquid penetration length is the average of over 5 injection cycles. The prime
character of the injector is evidenced from the early pilot-injection
from 1.33 ms to 1.53 ms after start of injection. The images of the
early pilot-injection can also been seen in Fig. 1(c). After 1.6 ms,
the main injection starts and the spray jet begins to penetrate into
the chamber rapidly and reaches its peak around 1.86 ms. Then,
the lengths reduce with the development of injection due to the
beginning of auto-ignition and subsequent ame propagation.
Finally, the injection nishes around 4.9 ms. Measurements of jet
penetrations without combustion have been widely studied in
320
35
Ambient Temp.
700 K
800 K
900 K
1000 K
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
35
Ambient Temp.
700 K
800 K
900 K
1000 K
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Time (ms)
Time (ms)
(d) Effect of flame on spray for soybean biodiesel at 800 K (left) and 1000 K (right)
Ambient temperature
700 K
800 K
900 K
1000 K
Soybean biodiesel
n-Butanol
NPP
pf Es
ps Ef
1.5
1.2
0.9
0.6
0.3
0.0
700 K
900 K
S100
B100
1.5
1.2
0.9
0.6
0.3
0.0
Peak Value
Peak Value
PS100=1.51
PS100=1.44
PB100=1.39
PB100=1.27
800 K
1000 K
Peak Value
Peak Value
PS100=1.53
PS100=1.42
PB100=1.34
PB100=1.22
9 1
Time (ms)
Fig. 2. Combustion pressure at various ambient temperatures.
1.5
B100
NPP
1.2
S100
0.9
0.6
0.3
0.0
3.2
B100
S100
2.8
2.4
2.0
1.6
700
800
900
1000
321
the n-butanol fuel at 700 K with f/16 setting, which was due to
the much lower ame luminosity for n-butanol. For soot measurement, the aperture was set to f/4.5 for all conditions. The ame
luminosity is extremely weak at 700 K, and no soot is detected
for both fuels. On one hand, the lower ambient temperature results
in the longer ignition delay, and thus reduce the local equivalence
ratio. On the other hand, the lower ambient temperature results in
the lower ame temperature. All of these can suppress the soot
formation. The main combustion of both fuels rstly occurs at near
wall region and follows by the ame propagating towards the
nozzle. Since no soot can be observed, the ame should be from
the chemiluminescence due to the combustion of gas phase
hydrocarbon species.
As the ambient temperature increases, the ame difference
between n-butanol and biodiesel becomes more pronounced. At
800 K, the ame luminosity of n-butanol is still very weak and
no soot is detected at this condition. For biodiesel, the ame
appears at near wall region rst and the soot is accordingly formed
at 3.06 ms. The diffusion ame and the soot distribution propagate
in the same direction towards the nozzle at about 3.99 ms. Subsequently, the diffusion ame and soot are seen at near wall region
and within the reacting spray jet. As the diffusion ame propagates
towards the nozzle, more soot can be observed at the reacting
spray jet due to the continuously replenished fuel-rich regions at
the spray tip. At 900 K, the ame propagation and soot distribution
for biodiesel are similar to those of 800 K, while the early ame
development for n-butanol is similar to that of 800 K but the soot
located at downstream of spray jet is seen at the later combustion
phase at 900 K.
At 1000 K, the ame and soot formation for n-butanol is still
weak and rst observed at near wall region at 2.79 ms. Following
the ame propagation towards the nozzle, stronger ame luminosity and a small amount of soot is seen at the reacting spray jet. For
biodiesel, more vigorous diffusion ame and soot distribution can
be seen at downstream of the spray in contrary to the low ambient
temperature cases which locate at near wall region. Subsequently,
the ame propagates to the chamber wall and higher soot concentration is perceivable. In the following images, the ame and soot
distribution is seen at the reacting spray jet and near wall region.
The ame luminosity is reduced with the decrease of ambient
temperatures indicating a lower ame temperature. As the NOx is
strongly dependent on the ame temperature, the combustion of
n-butanol is expected to yield less NOx although the energy input
is a little different in this experiment. Previous studies have
reported less NOx emissions with n-butanol addition in diesel
engines [11,12], which support the observation in the current
study. Apart from the lower overall ame natural luminosity, less
natural ame is seen for n-butanol at near wall region in the later
combustion phase compared to biodiesel, which potentially
improve the thermal efciency due to less convective heat loss. A
higher vaporization rate resulted from lower boiling point of nbutanol causes faster combustion rate, and the main reaction zone
barely reaches the chamber wall. The soot mass for n-butanol is
very low at 900 K and 1000 K and no soot can be seen at 700 K
and 800 K, whereas for biodiesel, the wider soot distribution and
higher concentration is seen at the reacting spray jet and near wall
region from 800 K to 1000 K.
3.4. Total soot mass analysis
Fig. 5 presents the spatial integrated total soot mass at different
ambient temperatures for both fuels. The total soot mass is the
competition results of soot formation and oxidation. As shown in
Fig. 5, soot mass increases sharply and reaches a quasi-steady state
before it commences continual decline dropped to zero approaching the end of combustion. With the decrease of ambient
322
B100 700K
S100 700K
Flame
Flame
B100 800K
Flame
B100 900K
Flame
S100 800K
Flame
S100 900K
Soot
Flame
B100 1000K
Soot
Flame
Soot
S100 1000K
Soot
Flame
Soot
Fig. 4. Natural ame luminosity and soot distribution at various ambient temperatures.
323
B100-800K
B100-900K
B100-1000K
S100-800K
S100-900K
S100-1000K
120
90
60
30
0
1
150
150
B50D50-800K
B50D50-1000K
S100-800K
S100-1000K
120
90
60
30
0
1
Time (ms)
Time (ms)
(a) The neat n-butanol and biodiesel
OCHOM H CO2 M
R1
R2
Table 2
The normalized time integrated soot mass at various ambient temperatures.
Fuels
700 K
800 K
900 K
1000 K
S100
B50D50
B100
0
0
0
9.9
6.79
0
15.32
12.46
0.27
19.15
14.38
1
324
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
at lower ambient temperature except for biodiesel combustion pressure at 700 K. The n-butanol has a higher normalized peak pressure indicating a higher potential thermal
efciency.
For biodiesel, the combustion occurs at downstream of spray
jet at 1000 K, while the ame is rstly seen at near wall
region at lower ambient temperatures. For n-butanol, the
main combustion rstly occurs at near wall region followed
by the ame propagating towards the nozzle. The ame can
be seen at reacting spray jet and near wall region for biodiesel, while the main n-butanol ame concentrates on reacting
spray jet. Flame propagation and distribution for n-butanol
is less sensitive to ambient temperature and ame luminosity is lower compared to biodiesel ame.
The soot mass increases with elevated ambient temperature.
No soot is detected for n-butanol and biodiesel at 700 K. For
biodiesel, the wider soot distribution and higher concentration is seen at the reacting spray jet and near wall region
from 800 K to 1000 K. For n-butanol, no soot is seen at
800 K and very low soot is seen concentrating at the reacting
spray jet at 900 K and 1000 K.
The B50D50 (50% n-butanol and 50% low-sulfur diesel fuel in
volume) has the later soot formation timing and the lower
total soot mass compared to neat biodiesel although the
oxygen content in both fuels is nearly the same. The value
of normalized time integrated soot mass for B50D50 fuel is
lower 2030% than that of biodiesel at different ambient
temperatures. The higher soot formation for biodiesel is
due to the fact that fuel-bound oxygen is less effective in
reducing soot production and that higher viscosity and boiling point results in more fuel-rich regions in mixing process.
Overall, n-butanol is more effective in soot suppression and
presents higher thermal efciency under a wide range of
ambient temperature conditions.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the nancial supports
provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China through
its Project of 51206120 and 51320105008 and by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Project of Grant DE-FG26-05NT42622.
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