Five More Companies Join Model Fuels Consortium

16 April 2007

Reaction Design announced that five more companies have joined its Model Fuels Consortium (MFC). The MFC, led by Reaction Design, works to develop, validate and apply simulation methods to improve engine and fuel design.

ConocoPhillips, Cummins Engine Company, Ford Motor Company, Honda, and Mazda join existing members Chevron, Dow Chemical Company, L'Institut Français du Pétrole, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan, PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota.

Engine manufacturers worldwide are under regulatory and economic pressures to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards and demanding fuel efficiency requirements. These pressures are aided by fuel producers who must consider an ever-widening product range. These challenges have also introduced new engine technologies that must be mastered.

Testing and empirical approaches are expensive and increasingly inadequate in addressing all of these design options and tradeoffs. The result is increasing reliance on the use of simulation in engine and fuel development.

Model fuels—computer representations of the chemical components found in fuels—are ideal for use in simulation because they consist of simplified surrogate chemical compounds that accurately represent the sometimes thousands of unique chemical compounds that comprise the actual fuel. To use model fuels effectively in simulation, it is necessary to validate the chemical descriptions of these surrogate compounds; this is the main focus of the work of the consortium.

The MFC is unique in that it allows engine design and fuel development companies to work together to tackle the challenges that reach across both industries.

—Yoshio Maeda, Chief Engineer of Honda R&D

Reaction Design develops and distributes CHEMKIN—software for modeling gas-phase and surface chemistry—and KINetics—a module that extends the capabilities of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) programs with detailed kinetics modeling.