Benefits of n-butanol, as a biofuel, in reducing the levels of soot precursors issued from the combustion of benzene flames

Abstract

Although oxygenated fuel additives are effective in reducing soot emissions, the extent to which molecular structure of the oxygenate plays a role in soot reduction has remained unclear and controversial. To gain a deeper insight in this field, a detailed chemical kinetic modeling approach was used to examine the phenomenon of suppression of sooting by the addition of oxygenated hydrocarbon species to the fuel. For this task, the PREMIX code in conjunction with Chemkin II and models resulting from the merging of validated kinetic schemes describing the oxidation of the components of the n-butanol-benzene mixtures were used to investigate the effect of n-butanol addition on the formation−depletion of acetylene recognized as soot precursor in flames under fuel-rich conditions. The first part of this study treats the dependence of the soot precursor amounts on n-butanol percentage in the fuel mixture, whereas the second part defines the key reaction mechanisms responsible for the observed reduction in C₂H₂ and consequently in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and soot amounts induced by the oxygenate additive. The principal objective of the current study was to obtain fundamental understanding of the mechanisms through which the oxygenate compound affects the soot precursor amounts. The modeling results indicated that there was a dramatic decrease in the acetylene peak height with the addition of the oxygenated addtitive. This finding was found to be due to the increase in the C₂H₂ consumption rates induced by n-butanol addition. Finally, the modeling results provided evidence that n-butanol played a role in changing acetylene formation mechanism by enhancing the role of C₃H₄P, C₃H₄ and aC₃H₅ and by eliminating the role of C₆H₄, C₅H₅, C₅H₆, H₂CCCCH, C₄H₂, C₅H₄O, C₂H, CHCHCHO, H₂C₄O and C₄H₄.