Modeling the autoignition of fuel blends with a multistep model

There is growing interest in using biodiesel in place of or in blends with petrodiesel in diesel engines; however, biodiesel oxidation chemistry is complicated to directly model and existing surrogate kinetic models are very large, making them computationally expensive. The present study describes a method for predicting the ignition behavior of blends of n-heptane and methyl butanoate, fuels whose blends have been used in the past as a surrogate for biodiesel. The autoignition is predicted using a multistep (8-step) model in order to reduce computational time and make this a viable tool for implementation into engine simulation codes. A detailed reaction mechanism for n-heptane-methyl butanoate blends was used as a basis for validating the multistep model results. The ignition delay trends predicted by the multistep model for the n-heptane-methyl butanoate blends matched well with that of the detailed CHEMKIN model for the majority of conditions tested.