New paper published that identifies polyoxymethylene ether structures with the best combination of fuel properties

Saturday, May 15, 2021

Alternative fuels can reduce emissions that cause climate change and other problems, but introducing them into the marketplace is difficult since they must satisfy many property requirements simultaneously.  In a new paper we have defined a set of property targets for diesel fuels and used structure-property relationships to show that several polyoxymethylene ethers (POMEs) can meet them.  These optimal POMEs generally have alkyl end-groups larger than methyl to produce sufficiently low water solubility and sufficiently high energy density.  Some of them also have additional alkyl groups attached to the oxymethylene backbone.  This work was done in collaboration with Bret Windom and Ken Reardon at the Colorado State University, and Teresa Alleman, Dan Ruddy, and Tom Foust at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  The full text is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2021.120509.