An updated comprehensive chemical kinetic model of C8-C20 n-alkanes

Abstract

Large n-alkanes are important reference components in the formulation of surrogates for Jet and Diesel fuels. This work focuses on the kinetics of n-alkanes larger than n-heptane with carbon chain length varying between 8 (n-octane) to 20 (n-eicosane) through newly acquired experimental data and detailed kinetic modeling. Extending the previous work by Zhang et al. on n-heptane, recent literature quantum chemical calculations have been used to generate a new set of consistent reaction rate rules for large alkanes. Based on these rules, the existing LLNL kinetic mechanisms for large n-alkanes has been revised and the model results have been compared to literature data and new stirred reactor experiments including important low temperature oxidation intermediates. The optimized model had generally been found to perform a good job against experimental data from current study and archived shock tube, and jet stirred reactor data in the literature.