Dieselization

A more complex utility is combined heat and power (or cogeneration). Here, the heat rejected hy a heat engine such as a steam turbine, gas turbine, or diesel engine is used as the hot utility. 

The principal sources of utility waste are associated with hot utilities (including cogeneration) and cold utilities. Furnaces, steam boilers, gas turbines, and diesel engines all produce waste as gaseous c bustion products. These combustion products contain carbon... 

The field of application for liquid chromatography in the petroleum world is vast separation of diesel fuel by chemical families, separation of distillation residues (see Tables 3.4 and 3.5), separation of polynuclear aromatics, and separation of certain basic nitrogen derivatives. Some examples are given later in this section. 

Carbon NMR is also applied using the same principles as those for hydrogen to measure the cetane indices for diesel fuels. 

Knowledge of their qu nt ty tjieir distribution by number of carbon atoms is Indispensable for the evaluation of low temperature behavior of diesel motor fuels as well as the production and transport characteristics of paraffinic crudes. 

Analysis of Aromatics in Diesel Motor Fuels by Liquid Chromatography... 

First of all, a technical clarification is necessary in the wider sense, motor fuels are chemical compounds, liquid or gas, which are burned in the presence of air to enable thermal engines to run gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuels. The term heating fuel is reserved for the production of heat energy in boilers, furnaces, power plants, etc. 

Thus, according to the definitions, diesel fuel (or gas oil) is not a heating fuel but a motor fuel. Incidentally, heavy fuel can be considered a heating fuel or a motor fuel depending on its application in a burner or in a marine diesel engine. 

With respect to fuels utilized as heating fuels for industrial furnaces, or as motor fuels for large diesel engines such as those in ships or power generation sets, the characteristics of primary importance are viscosity, sulfur content and the content of extremely heavy materials (asphaltenes) whose combustion can cause high emissions of particulates which are incompatible with antipollution legislation. 

In a general manner, diesel engines, jet engines, and domestic or industrial burners operate with lean mixtures and their performance is relatively insensitive to the equivalence ratio. On the other hand, gasoline engines require a fuel-air ratio close to the stoichiometric. Indeed, a too-rich mixture leads to an excessive exhaust pollution from CO emissions and unburned hydrocarbons whereas a too-lean mixture produces unstable combustion (reduced driveability and misfiring). 

Diesel Fuel Characteristics Imposed by its Combustion Behavior... 

All properties required by diesel fuel are justified by the characteristics of the diesel engine cycle, in particular the following ... 

The diesel engine takes in and compresses the air. The fuel is injected into the cylinder in atomized form at the end of the compression stroke and is vaporized in the air. Ignition begins by auto-ignition in one or several zones in the combustion chamber where the conditions of temperature, pressure and concentration combine to enable combustion to start. 

Power output is controlled, not by adjusting the quantity of fuel/air mixture as in the case of induced spark ignition engines, but in changing the flow of diesel fuel introduced in a fixed volume of air. The work required to aspirate the air is therefore considerably reduced which contributes still more to improve the efficiency at low loads. 

The diesel engine operates, inherently by its concept, at variable fuel-air ratio. One easily sees that it is not possible to attain the stoichiometric ratio because the fuel never diffuses in an ideal manner into the air for an average equivalence ratio of 1.00, the combustion chamber will contain zones that are too rich leading to incomplete combustion accompanied by smoke and soot formation. Finally, at full load, the overall equivalence ratio... 

The necessity of carrying out injection at high pressure and the atomization into fine droplets using an injector imposes very precise volatility characteristics for the diesel fuel. French and European specifications have established two criteria for minimum and maximum volatility therefore, the distilled fraction in volume % should be ... 

For a long time the official specifications for diesel fuel set only a mciximum viscosity of 9.5 mm /s at 20°C. Henceforth, a range of 2.5 mm /s minimum to 4.5 mm /s maximum has been set no longer for 20°C but at 40°C which seems to be more representative of injection pump operation. Except for special cases such as very low temperature very fluid diesel fuel and very heavy products, meeting the viscosity standards is not a major problem in refining. 

The characteristics of diesel fuel taken into account in this area are the cloud point, the pour point, and the cold filter plugging point (CFPP). 

At lower temperatures, the crystals increase in size, and form networks that trap the liquid and hinder its ability to flow. The pour point is attained which can, depending on the diesel fuel, vary between -15 and -30°C. This characteristic (NF T 60-105) is determined, like the cloud point, with a very rudimentary device (maintaining a test tube in the horizontal position without apparent movement of the diesel fuel inside). 

The cold filter plugging point (CFPP) is the minimum temperature at which a given volume of diesel fuel passes through a well defined filter in a limited time interval (NF M 07-042 and EN 116 standards). For conventional diesel fuels in winter, the CFPP is usually between —15 and —25°C. 

The experimental conditions used to determine the CFPP do not exactly reflect those observed in vehicles the differences are due to the spaces in the filter mesh which are much larger in the laboratory filter, the back-pressure and the cooling rate. Also, research is continuing on procedures that are more representative of the actual behavior of diesel fuel in a vehicle and which correlate better with the temperature said to be operability , the threshold value for the Incident. In 1993, the CEN looked at two new methods, one called SFPP proposed by Exxon Chemicals (David et al., 1993), the other called AGELFI and recommended by Agip, Elf and Fina (Hamon et al., 1993). 

In Europe, the classification of diesel fuels according to cold behavior is shown in Tables 5.13 and 5.14. The products are divided into ten classes, six for temperate climates, four for arctic zones. 

European diesel fuel specifications (EN 590 Standard). Requirements for temperate climatic zones. 

Figure 5.9 shows an example of the efficiency of these products. The reductions of CFPP and pour point can easily attain 6 to 12°C for concentrations between 200 and 600 ppm by weight. The treatment cost is relatively low, on the order of a few hundredths of a Franc per liter of diesel fuel. In practice, a diesel fuel containing a flow improver is recognized by the large difference (more than 10°C) between the cloud point and the CFPP. 

For diesel engines, the fuel must have a chemical structure that favors auto-ignition. This quality is expressed by the cetane number. 

The behavior of the diesel fuel is compared to that of two pure hydrocarbons selected as a reference J... 

A diesel fuel has a cetane number X, if it behaves like a binary mixture of X% (by volume) n-cetane and of (100 - A) % a-methylnaphthalene. 

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