Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Soot Mechanism of Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) with Various Oxygen Concentrations

A multi-step acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) phenomenological soot model was proposed and implemented into KIVA-3V Release 2 code. Experiments were conducted in an optical constant volume combustion chamber to investigate the combustion and soot emission characteristics under the conditions of 1000 K initial temperature with various oxygen concentrations (21%, 16%, 11%). Multi-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were conducted in conjunction under the same operation conditions. The predicted soot mass traces showed good agreement with experimental data. As ambient oxygen decreased from 21% to 11%, ignition delay retarded and the distribution of temperature became more homogenous. Compared to 21% ambient oxygen, the peak value of total soot mass at 16% oxygen concentration was higher due to the suppressed soot oxidation mechanism. At 11% ambient oxygen, both soot formation and oxidation mechanism were suppressed, but more so for the soot formation effect, thus leading to the reduction of soot particles under highly-diluted oxygen condition.