REDUCED KINETIC MECHANISM FOR HIGH TEMPERATURE PROPANE IGNITION

C. Treviño and J. C. Prince
1UNAM, Mexico; 2ITVeracruz, Mexico; 3On sabbatical leave at ELTE, Hungary
ctrev@servidor.unam.mx

The high temperature (above 1100 K) ignition of propane is studied in this work. The initial detailed mechanism consist of 180 elementary reactions with 40 species. Through a systematic reduction strategy, the minimal set of elementary chemical reactions can be reduced to 43 with 27 different species, reproducing the ignition conditions. Basically, the ignition delay time corresponds to the depletion time of the propane fuel, attacked by radicals, which produces secondary fuels like ethylene (), methylacetylene () and acetylene (), among others, that are consumed in times much shorter than the consumption time of the primary fuel. Thus, the radical concentrations must be properly deduced to describe correctly the ignition delay time. A four-step global reaction mechanism is proposed with the following species to be not in steady state: H, , , , , , together with the primary fuel  and the oxygen.