Droplets heating and evaporation: an application to diesel-biodiesel fuel mixtures

The heating and evaporation of automotive fuel droplets are crucial to the design of internal combustion engines and to ensuring their good performance. Accurate modelling is essential to the understanding of these processes and ultimately improving engine design. The interest in fossil-biodiesel fuel blends has been mainly stimulated by depletion of fossil fuels and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute towards climate change. This paper presents an analytical investigation into the application of discrete component model for the heating and evaporation of multi-component fuel droplets to several blended diesel-biodiesel fuels. The model considers the contribution of all groups of hydrocarbons in diesel fuel and methyl esters in biodiesel fuels. The main features of new application to the analysis of blended-fuel droplets in engine-like conditions is described. The model is applied to several blends of diesel, combining 98 components of hydrocarbons, and 19 types biodiesel fuels, combining up to 17 species of methyl ester, considering the differences in their chemical levels of saturation, and thermodynamic and transport properties. One important finding is that some fuel blends, e.g. B5 (5% biodiesel fuel and 95% diesel fuel), can give almost identical droplet lifetimes to the one predicted for pure diesel fuel; i.e. such mixtures can be directly used in conventional diesel engines with minimal, or no, modification to the droplet break-up process.