Model Fuels Consortium Expanding

9 April 2007

At the upcoming SAE World Congress, Reaction Design will introduce several new members of the Model Fuels Consortium (MFC).

The MFC is a collaboration of automakers, fuel suppliers and chemical manufacturers, led by Reaction Design, which seeks to support the development of cleaner-burning, more efficient engines and fuels by accelerating the development of software tools and databases.

Founding members of the MFC include Chevron, The Dow Chemical Company, Nissan, PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota.

Reaction Design founded the MFC in 2005 under the premise that advanced engine and fuel design are becoming progressively more closely coupled and reliant on the use of simulation in new engine development.

The MFC is focused on:

• Coordinating with government laboratories and academic groups to establish an accessible data storage site for chemical kinetics of hydrocarbon surrogates for real fuels (initially gasoline, diesel, and kerosene);

• Populating a database with currently available chemistry mechanisms, including related thermodynamic and transport properties;

• Assembling kinetic data for missing components and component mixtures, using advanced mechanism-generation approaches where appropriate;

• Developing documented validation cases for targeted experimental data, including enhancement of current tools for simulating in-cylinder reacting flows;

• Extending and developing software tools to compare, analyze, and automatically reduce mechanisms and to integrate data from different sources; and

• Reducing detailed mechanisms, using the tools developed, for use in multidimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for targeted sets of operating conditions defined by industry.