A study on the mechanism reduction and evaluation of biodiesel with the change of mechanism reduction factors

This study aims to confirm the effect of changing the various factors with the directed relation graph error propagation–based methods and to adopt a new approach of the mechanism evaluation in the reduction of biodiesel mechanism. The factors considered in this study were a threshold value, target species, ambient conditions, and the evaluation formula consists of the reduction rates and the maximum error rate of ignition delay to objectively compare the skeletal mechanisms generated under different conditions. For a threshold value, the automatic mechanism reduction process was used to select the appropriate threshold value by applying the relative tolerance and absolute tolerance; so relative tolerance and absolute tolerance represent the factor of the threshold value. Also, the seven steps of mechanism reduction process consist of directed relation graph error propagation, directed relation graph error propagation with sensitivity analysis, peak concentration analysis, full species sensitivity analysis, and A-factor modification. As a result of the mechanism reduction, different relative tolerance and absolute tolerance values should be applied to each step to select the appropriate threshold value. For target species, considering polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon species as target species shows higher efficiency of mechanism reduction. Also, considering the negative temperature coefficient region as ambient conditions helps the mechanism be reduced efficiently than a wide range of ambient conditions. Finally, the reduced mechanism which had 247 species and 1129 reactions was generated, and the maximum error rate of ignition delay was about 30%. For the applicability of three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics and verification of the reduced mechanism, the compression ignition engine simulation was performed. As a result of three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics, the predicted cylinder pressure, rate of heat release, indicated mean effective pressure, and power were similar to the experimental results. However, the results of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide emissions did not match the experimental results.