Numerical study of gasoline-ethanol blends in a counterflow premixed flame

CLAUDIO TORRES; DARIO ALVISO; JUAN CARLOS ROLON; NASSER DARABIHA

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; 23rd ABCM International Congress of Mechanical Engineering - COBEM2015; 2015

ABCM

Gasoline is a complex real fuel, with a wide variation in composition between commercial gasolines. These characteristics indicate the difficulty of using this fuel for numerical studies. In order to avoid these difficulties, simplified synthetic fuels, called "surrogate fuels" are used. On the other hand, ethanol is a renewable, biodegradable, non-toxic fuel that can be produced from plants such as corn, sugar cane, beets, etc. In many countries, gasoline is normally blended with ethanol. In order to acquire a better understanding of combustion fundamental phenomena, it is preferable to study flames configurations with flows relatively simple that are easy to control. The counterflow laminar flames meet these criteria: the flow is well known, it can be modeled from theoretical and numerical points of view and experimentally it canbe controlled in a relatively easy manner. This paper presents numerical studies of gasoline-ethanol blends combustion in laminar counterflow gaseous premixed flames configuration. The key objective of the study is to analyze the flame structure of different gasoline-ethanol blends. A gasoline model (containing ethanol), a semi-detailed mechanism with150 species and 759 reactions, was chosen to carry the simulations. Laminar flame velocities were estimated as a function of equivalence ratio for different gasoline-ethanol blends. And laminar gasoline-ethanol counterflow premixed flames structures were presented and analyzed, also for different blends.