Construction of a small-sized simplified chemical kinetics model for the simulation of n-propylcyclohexane combustion properties

The development of a compact mechanism has made a great contribution to work on the combustion of hydrocarbon species and facilitates the investigations on chemical kinetics and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies. N-propylcyclohexane (NPCH) is one of the important components for jet, diesel, and gasoline fuels which needs a reliable compact reaction kinetics mechanism. This study aims to investigate the construction of a well-validated mechanism for NPCH with a simplified chemical kinetics model that delivers a good prediction ability for the key combustion parameters in a wide range of conditions (temperatures, pressures, and equivalence rates). The NPCH reaction kinetic mechanism was constructed with the aid of a coupling process, simplification process, rate modification, and a combination of standard reduction methods. The model includes a simplified sub-mechanism with 16 species and 58 reactions and a semi-detailed core mechanism with 56 species and 390 reactions. Two key parameters including ignition delay time and laminar flame speed are simulated by the use of ANSYS Chemkin-Pro. The simulation results for these parameters are validated against the available data in the literature, and the results show a good agreement compared to the experimental data over a wide range of conditions covering low to high temperatures at different pressures and equivalence ratios.