Sensitivity to Experimental Uncertainty in Surrogate Descriptions of Aviation Fuels

摘要

The simplification of fuel description in both computational and experimental combustion studies is a widely accepted approach and involves the construction of a fuel surrogate that captures some of its physical and chemical properties. The surrogate composition matches a certain set of properties, typically restricted to chemical properties, and referred to as combustion property targets (CPT). The surrogate composition thus determined is not necessarily unique, especially when taking into account experimental uncertainties. This study aims to quantify the variation in composition of surrogate descriptions, while matching CPTs based on both physical and chemical properties in this work by including measurements from recent distillation procedures. Theoretical and computational frameworks have been developed, which, for a particular multicomponent fuel and a set of CPTs, evaluate the variation in range of surrogate composition. The sensitivity of composition to each CPT can be posed as a multi-parametric optimization problem and a brief theoretical discussion along with computational results using this approach are presented. Results are shown in particular for Jet-A and JP-8, for which a wide variety of surrogate descriptions have been proposed and it is explicitly shown that the majority of the search space falls within experimental uncertainty for particular well-established surrogates.