• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.27-33
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• 2019

Combustion characteristics of gasoline/ethanol fuel were investigated both numerically and experimentally for vehicle fire safety. The numerical simulation was performed on the well-stirred reactor (WSR) to simulate the homogeneous gasoline engine and to clarify the effect of ethanol addition in the gasoline fuel. The simulating cases with three independent variables, i.e. ethanol mole fraction, equivalence ratio and residence time, were designed to predict and optimized systematically based on the response surface method (RSM). The results of stoichiometric gasoline surrogate show that the auto-ignition temperature increases but NOx yields decrease with increasing ethanol mole fraction. This implies that the bioethanol added gasoline is an eco-friendly fuel on engine running condition. However, unburned hydrocarbon is increased dramatically with increasing ethanol content, which results from the incomplete combustion and hence need to adjust combustion itself rather than an after-treatment system. For more tangible understanding of gasoline/ethanol fuel on pollutant emissions, experimental measurements of combustion products were performed in gasoline/ethanol pool fires in the cup burner. The results show that soot yield by gravimetric sampling was decreased dramatically as ethanol was added, but NOx emission was almost comparable regardless of ethanol mole fraction. For soot morphology by TEM sampling, the incipient soot such as a liquid like PAHs was observed clearly on the soot of higher ethanol containing gasoline, and the soot might be matured under the undiluted gasoline fuel.