Projects
Approximately 3 billion people use biomass combustion to cook and heat. The inefficient combustion of these biofuels results in deleterious human health effects, accelerated deforestation, and increased assault on women. We test stove technologies while trying to build more combustion theory into their design and operation.
High-performance jet fuel (HPF) represents a subset of sustainable aviation fuel that improves the value and performance of the fuel while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and remaining within ‘drop-in’ operability and safety limits. We have developed a HPF optimization framework to quantify the achievable performance gains by optimizing blends of molecules considering operability and safety properties.
Many currently approved SAFs are limited to a maximum blend ratio of 50% with conventional jet fuel due to materials compatibility issues (i.e., O-ring volume swell). Optical dilatometer measurements of volume swell for sustainable aviation fuels are being carried out in the lab to screen candidate fuels at an early stage of the approval process.
Fuels derived from sustainable feedstocks have significant potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with aviation. In our lab, a Tier α sustainable aviation prescreening tool has been developed to predict the acceptability of novel fuel candidates with a minimal fuel volume requirement.
One of the most critical, and final, step in the certification of alternative jet fuels is the certification process.
One method to increase confidence and reduce volume in tiered testing is to use surrogate fuels for manipulation of properties. Key fuel performance properties (surface tension, viscosity, density) for cold-start ignition was determined prior to this study.