Title: The Development of C3MECH: From Hydrogen Oxidation to Soot Formation
Time: 9:00 to 11:30, Thursday, April.18, 2024
Place: F310, School of Mechanical Engineering
Host: LU Xingcai, Professor, YU Liang , Assoc. Professor (Institute of Advanced Energy and Powertrain Technology)

Biography
Prof. Curran is a professor at University of Galway, the Director of Combustion Chemistry Center. He obtained his PhD in combustion kinetics from NUIG in 1994. He worked as a research scientist at LLNL until 1999 before becoming a lecturer at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. Concurrently, he collaborated with NUIG until 2005. Joining NUIG in 2005, he rose to Senior Lecturer in 2009 and Professor in 2013. He attained a DSc from NUI in 2011 and joined the Royal Irish Academy in 2015. He became a Fellow of the Combustion Institute in 2018. He serves on editorial boards including the Proceedings of Combustion Institute and Progress in Energy and Combustion Science. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) recognized him among the top 1% of researchers cited in his field yearly from 2014 to 2022. He received the Boyle Higgins Gold Medal in April 2017 and the Yakov B. Zeldovich Gold Medal in July 2022 from the Institute of Chemistry in Ireland and the Combustion Institute, respectively.

Abstract
There is an increasing demand for kinetic models of surrogate components to predict the combustion and emissions of real fuels. In this talk, a new surrogate fuel mechanism, C3Mech, is proposed by the Computational Chemistry Consortium (C3). This mechanism is constructed based on a C0–C4 core mechanism, with important species of interest in complex fuel surrogates. This kinetic model consists of the latest chemistry subsets developed by the different partners in the context of the C3 effort. The proposed model is tested against a comprehensive set of experimental data for various fuels and blends over a wide range of temperatures, pressures, dilutions and equivalence ratios. Overall, the model shows good predictions for most of the experimental data. Due to the large size of C3Mech, a mechanism processing tool was developed to abstract species and reactions to generate any particular surrogate fuel and multi-fuel mechanisms of smaller size which can be used for preliminary mechanism reduction.