Title: Investigations on initial soot formation at high pressures

Authors: H. Bohm, M. Braun-Unkhoff, P. Frank

Addresses: Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Pfaffenwaldring 38-40, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany. ' Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Pfaffenwaldring 38-40, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany. ' Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Pfaffenwaldring 38-40, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany '

Abstract: The formation and emission of soot particles from combustion engines are of predominant importance for the emission of pollutions. Current smoke production and burnout calculations fail to predict the soot particle concentrations quite often by considerable margins, especially at short reaction times. The present investigation focuses on the transition from the gas phase to particle inception by evaluating shock tube data. The experimental database consisted of soot volume fraction measurements for the fuels benzene, phenylacetylene, toluene and ethene at elevated pressures previously obtained in the literature. These experiments were examined computationally to provide information on the principal reaction steps leading to the fast formation of soot precursors, respectively soot. It was found that the reaction pathways to the formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), including only successive growth steps of aliphatic hydrocarbons, are in disagreement with the measured induction times of soot formation.

Keywords: soot formation; complex chemical models; PAH; particle inception.

DOI: 10.1504/PCFD.2003.003771

Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal, 2003 Vol.3 No.2/3/4, pp.145 - 150

Published online: 24 Dec 2003 *

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