Facilities
Location
The lab is located on the University of Dayton campus in Kettering Laboratories. Visitors to the lab are encouraged to park in C Lot and ask for a parking pass. Visitors can also refer to the School of Engineering page regarding visiting the building.
Laboratory and office space
The lab currently consists of three rooms (two laboratory and one office). The main student area has windows! The office space is pictured here in during COVID and most students have vacated the space of their workstations.
The main laboratory areas also host a fair amount of space for seating and personal laptop usage.
Equipment and hardware
The lab has several standard pieces of equipment common to the aviation fuel community. The lab also has several pieces of equipment not common elsewhere (GCxGC-VUV/FID, chilled surface tension measurements, and optical dilometry).
GCxGC-VUV/FID
The HEAT lab hosts one of only a few GCxGC-VUV/FIDs known to exist. The system is used to separate molecules in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) candidates via GCxGC, quantify the analytes with a flame ionization detector (FID), and identify as many isomers as possible with vacuum ultraviolet light spectroscopy (VUV).
An exemplar separation of the multidimensional separation from the SepSolve INSIGHT flow modulator with an Agilent 8890 and FID. The color reflect the quantity of mass detected in the FID. The column set-up has a 1st dimension apolar column, while second column has a mid-polar column. The fuel displayed is an average jet fuel (A-2, POSF 10325).
Spectra from the VUV detector are matched to a known library database. The VUV detector is excellent with stereo-isomer distinction, as shown below. The existing database on VUV spectra is >700 analytes in the jet range. The lab is actively adding spectra and is planning on predicting spectra in the future.
An illustration of a side by side comparison of VUV and FID data simulaneously recorded. The FID data, right screen, is plotted in 2 dimensions and the intensity of the signal represented by color contors. The VUV data, left screen, is recorded in linear time and then converted to 2 dimensions for comparison to the FID.
Property measurements
The lab has an assortment of several pieces to measure critical operability and performance properties of aviation fuels. Extensive efforts have been made to minimize the amount of material needed for property measurements. Equipment has been selected for the minimum volume needed for testing and the sequence of events for fuel property measurements has been optimized. The amount of fuel needed for most tests is ~10 mL!
Undergraduate students at the University of Dayton worked to develop a low temperature surface tension method leveraging an existing in house chiller.
The lab has 10 optical dilatometers that were built for materials compatibility testing.
F.R.I.D.A.Y.
In-house computational facilities
The HEAT lab has an internal high performance computer named F.R.I.D.A.Y. There are several other computers in the lab that have high performance capabilities that have been used to determine drop-in high performance fuel compositions. (See the high performance fuels page for example.)