Simulations of Flowing Mildly-Cracked Normal Alkanes Incorporating Proportional Product Distributions

Hydrocarbon fuels have been used as a cooling media in aircraft jet engines for many years. However, advanced aircraft engines are reaching a practical heat transfer limit beyond which the sensible heat transfer provided by fuels is no longer adequate. One solution is to use an endothermic fuel that absorbs heat through chemical reactions. A two-dimensional computational model is developed to calculate the heat and mass transport associated with a flowing fuel using a unique global chemical kinetics model. Most past models do not account for changes in the chemical composition of a flowing fuel and also do not adequately predict flow properties in the supercritical regime. The two-dimensional computational model presented calculates the changing flow properties of a supercritical reacting fuel by use of experimentally derived proportional product distributions. The calculations are validated by measured experimental data obtained from a flow reactor in which n-decane and n-dodecane are mildly cracked. It is believed that these simulations will assist the fundamental understanding of high-temperature fuel flow experiments.