This study is part of larger effort in the Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE) at the University of Utah to simulate JP-8 open pool fire that engulf a container of high energy material. Such a scenario could occur during a crash of a military aircraft. Knowledge of jet fuel properties is important for understanding and predicting JP-8 pool fire behavior and soot formation. However, most jet fuels including JP-8 are extremely complex in composition and are of significant variance in composition due to many factors. A simple and well-defined hydrocarbon mixture, surrogate fuel, is thus desired for experiments reproducibility and species tractability. This study is aimed at developing a JP-8 surrogate formulation strategy and testing the surrogate in different scenarios.;Based on characterization of practical jet fuel sample, and an understanding the interaction between fuel property and composition, a methodology for developing jet fuel surrogate was established with the use of a component class approach. Surrogates of different complexity were designed and compared with the parent jet fuel. Recommended surrogate fuels were tested in both open pool fires and in a laminar flow drop tube furnace.;Recommended surrogates were found to be able to capture the major flame characteristics of the parent jet fuel in open pool fires. They were also observed to be able to reproduce the characteristics of the parent jet fuel flam in many aspects in the drop tube furnace. The recommended surrogate was capable of reproducing Polyaromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) profiles similar to those observed in JP-8 under the same test conditions.;Drawbacks of the component-class approach were identified while testing surrogates against Jet-A under transient pool fire test conditions. It was found that by applying the structural group contributions approach, one could improve the representation of the parent jet fuel and help simulate the trend of property changes under certain test conditions. The approach was first used to predict sooting tendency of hydrocarbon liquids in diffusion flames with success. Then new surrogates were formulated to obtain closer agreement to the parent jet fuel in terms of fuel aromaticity and degrees of branching and substitution than with previous surrogates. New surrogates were found to be able to reproduce the trend of increasing smoke point of Jet-A samples taken during transient pool fire when simulating the change of liquid phase with a batch distillation calculation.
展开▼
