The need for simulation tools for the internal combustion engine is becoming more and more important due to the complex engine design and increasingly strict emission regulation. One needs accurate and fast models, but fuels consist of a complex mixture of different molecules which cannot realistically be handled in computations. Simplifications are required and are realized using fuel surrogates. The main goal of this work is to show that the choice of the surrogates is of importance if simplified models are used and that the performance strongly depends upon the sensitivity of the fuel properties that refer to the main model hypotheses.
This paper starts with an overview of surrogates for diesel and bio-diesel as well as the motivation for choosing them. Next, a phenomenological model for vaporizing fuel-sprays is implemented to assess how well-known surrogates for diesel and bio-diesel affect the obtained results.
The model was used to calculate the liquid length and the results show significant differences among the used surrogates. These differences are explained based on the spray model's hypotheses and the surrogate fuel properties. The sensitivity of the model on the spray angle was also studied, as this is an important input parameter but is mostly determined with a large experimental uncertainty.