Experimental and modeling study of the ignition kinetics of dimethyl carbonate

In this work, the ignition delay times (IDTs) of dimethyl carbonate (DMC) were measured by using a rapid compression machine (RCM) over a wide range of temperatures (778–1102 K), pressures (20 and 40 bar), equivalence ratios (φ= 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0) and fuel concentrations (1% and 2%), yielding results which are in substantial variance with those calculated with detailed kinetics in the literature over the entire range of conditions investigated. By further identifying the key reactions controlling ignition under different conditions by using sensitivity and path analyses, and taking the experimental data of typical working conditions as the target variable, the Arrhenius parameters of the main sensitive reactions are optimized through the global optimization using the genetic algorithm and the local optimization using the Powell's Direction Set method. Results show that the overall performance of the optimized kinetics model is in good agreement with the experimental data, and the IDTs of DMC can be predicted over the wide range of conditions.