Assessing Fuel Property Effects on Cavitation and Erosion Propensity Using a Computational Fuel Screening Tool

To advance compression ignition combustion strategies, researchers have evaluated fuel property effects and their impact on achieving higher efficiencies and lower emissions levels relative to current capabilities. Within the Department of Energy's Co-Optima initiative, there has been a recent focus on understanding the influence of fuel properties on fuel injection performance. To help identify candidate fuels that can meet desired injector performance metrics, a computational fuel screening tool is under development that can link fuel properties with the tendency of a given fuel to cavitate and lead to cavitation-induced erosion. In the initial development of this tool, five liquid fuel properties were selected to represent candidate fuels, namely, density, viscosity, vapor pressure, surface tension, and heat of vaporization. A design of experiments methodology was used to generate a set of pseudofuel cases, which can represent the main effects and interactions among the fuel properties and be related to cavitation erosion predictions. Large eddy simulations were performed using a mixture modeling approach to predict the cavitation and erosion propensity of these pseudofuels in terms of the mean fuel vapor mole fraction and stored impact energy from repeated cloud collapse events. The low-order regression models generated from this study revealed the importance of liquid fuel density on cavitation formation, whereas liquid viscosity was found to have a strong negative correlation with erosion severity. The surrogate models were then used in the fuel screening tool to rank the cavitation and erosion tendency of four candidate single-component fuels: methyl decanoate, iso-octane, ethanol, and n-dodecane. While the fuel screening tool was not able to quantitatively predict the cavitation and erosion response metrics, the tool was able to accurately rank the relative cavitation and erosion propensity of the four fuels. Overall, ethanol and iso-octane were observed to produce the highest levels of cavitation and erosion, respectively.