Modeling for Nitromethane oxidation
Krishna Prasad Shrestha, Lars Seidel, Thomas Zeuch, Fabian Mauss
Abstract
The diminishing availability of conventional fuels and stricter regulations on pollution control and CO2 emission targets have led scientist and engineers to look for alternative fuels. Recently nitromethane has slowly gained interest as alternative fuel over conventional fuel for internal combustion engines. In the past, it was mostly used as rocket propellant or as an explosives [1,2]. Nitromethane is an energetic compound with a wide variety of applications, including its use as a monopropellant, a liquid explosive, a solvent for chemical processing and analysis, and a highperformance fuel additive for internal combustion engines and pulsed detonation engines [3]. The chemical formula of nitromethane is CH3NO2. As the name suggests, the molecule is essentially methane with one of the four hydrogens replaced by a nitro group. In essence, it is the simplest of possible energetic CHON molecules that contain nitro groups, which is why it is often used in reaction studies as a prototype for more complex energetic materials. There is no reliable kinetic model for nitromethane combustion, which is validated over a wide range of experimental conditions. There are a few published studies [4–8] both numerically and experimentally focusing often on a single reactor at very specific conditions. The aim of the present work is to extend our recently published mechanism [9] for syngas, methane and ammonia oxidation to include CH3NO2 as fuel and validate against the available experimental data from the literature. The development and compilation strategy for our mechanism is described in our recent work [9] and this study is conducted in a similar manner. Rates are taken mainly from [7,10–16]. This makes the kinetic model more robust and reliable for combustion modelling.