Phase behavior modeling of gasoline with oxygenated additives and bioethanol

T. M. SORIA; M. GONZALEZ PRIETO; S. BOTTINI; S. PEREDA

Puerto Varas

Conferencia; IX Iberoamerican Conference on Phase Equilibria and Fluid Properties for Process Design (EQUIFASE 2012); 2012

Universidad de Concepcion

Bioethanol fuel blends play nowadays an important role in countries like Brazil and USA. Moreover, policies worldwide promote blending of fossil- and bio-fuels to meet sustainable targets. Ethanol and oxygenated additives have a high impact in the final fuel properties. In that regard, the non-ideality of mixtures containing ethanol and hydrocarbons strongly affects the phase behavior of the blend and consequently has an impact on its storage, transportation and use in engines. Gasoline is a multicomponent mixture of mainly four families of hydrocarbons: normal-, branched- and cyclic-alkanes and aromatic. In previous works, phase behavior of all these hydrocarbon families in mixtures with water and alcohols were modeled with the group-contribution with association GCA-EoS equation of state. In the present work, the parameters required to include oxygenated additives (ethers) have been determined. Finally, the GCA-EoS predictive capacity to describe the effect of adding ethanol and oxygenated additives to different commercial gasolines was evaluated.