The Performance of a Surrogate Blend in Simulating the Sooting Behavior of a Practical, Distillate JP-4

A surrogate fuel has been developed to simulate the atomization and combustion performance of a practical, petroleum distillate JP-4. The surrogate is comprised of fourteen pure hydrocarbons and formulated to reproduce the distillation curve and compound class composition of the parent petroleum distillate fuel. In previous work, the atomization performance (evaluated in terms of the atomization quality in an isothermal chamber), and the combustion performance (evaluated in terms of the mean axial velocity and thermal fields in a spray-atomized, swirl-stabilized, model laboratory combustor) were found to be equivalent for the petroleum and surrogate JP-4. The present study addresses the sooting performance of the two fuels, as well as that of two reference fuels (isooctane and a high aromatic petroleum JP-5) of purposefully disparate properties. The sooting performance of the petroleum and surrogate JP-4 are nearly identical, and distinctly different from that of either the isooctane or the JP-5. The surrogate represents, as a result, an attractive fuel blend for the study of fuel compositional effects on the combustion performance of practical fuels in a spray-fired combustor.