Surrogate formulation for diesel and jet fuels using the minimalist functional group (MFG) approach

Surrogate fuels aim to reproduce real fuel combustion characteristics in order to enable predictive simulations and fuel/engine design. In this work, surrogate mixtures were formulated for three diesel fuels (Coryton Euro and Coryton US-2D certification grade and Saudi pump grade) and two jet fuels (POSF 4658 and POSF 4734) using the minimalist functional group (MFG) approach, a method recently developed and tested for gasoline fuels. The diesel and jet fuel surrogates were formulated by matching five important functional groups, while minimizing the surrogate components to two species. Another molecular parameter, called as branching index (BI), which denotes the degree of branching was also used as a matching criterion. The present works aims to test the ability of the MFG surrogate methodology for high molecular weight fuels (e.g., jet and diesel). ¹H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was used to analyze the composition of the groups in diesel fuels, and those in jet fuels were evaluated using the molecular data obtained from published literature. The MFG surrogates were experimentally evaluated in an ignition quality tester (IQT), wherein ignition delay times (IDT) and derived cetane number (DCN) were measured. Physical properties, namely, average molecular weight (AMW) and density, and thermochemical properties, namely, heat of combustion and H/C ratio were also compared. The results show that the MFG surrogates were able to reproduce the combustion properties of the above fuels, and we demonstrate that fewer species in surrogates can be as effective as more complex surrogates. We conclude that the MFG approach can radically simplify the surrogate formulation process, significantly reduce the cost and time associated with the development of chemical kinetic models, and facilitate surrogate testing.