Energy & Fuels, Vol.12, No.2, 344-352, 1998
Computational fluid dynamics simulations of jet fuel oxidation incorporating pseudo-detailed chemical kinetics
Military jet aircraft circulate fuel as a cooling medium. Upon heating, dissolved oxygen reacts with the fuel forming insoluble deposits which can block fuel lines and disrupt operation of close tolerance valves. Thus, an understanding of how dissolved oxygen reacts with the fuel is important to aircraft designers. A pseudo-detailed kinetics model which considers antioxidant chemistry was incorporated in a computational fluid dynamics code, and dissolved oxygen and hydroperoxide concentration profiles along a stainless steel tube were calculated for both nearly isothermal and nonisothermal flowing systems. Flowing experiments were performed with both a severely hydrotreated fuel and a straight-run fuel, and the predicted dissolved oxygen and hydroperoxide profiles agreed reasonably well with the measured profiles over a range of bulk fuel temperatures and flow conditions. The present model offers an improved understanding of jet fuel oxidation and antioxidant chemistry.