Yield sooting index (YSI) is a quantitative measure of the tendency of a molecule or fuel mixture to form soot when burned. The procedure is to dope a small concentration—typically 1000 ppm—of the test compound or mixture into the fuel of a methane/air nonpremixed flame and measure the resulting change in soot concentration.
YSI measurements are easy and only require 1 mL of sample—if you have samples of interesting molecules or fuels, contact us about possible collaboration!
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For more information about YSI, see this seminar Charles gave at Colorado State (document below), the YSI Primer on our Harvard Dataverse site, or our review paper (coming soon!).
We have measured YSIs for hundreds of pure hydrocarbons. The canonical database of published values is available on the Harvard Dataverse.
In collaboration with Peter St. John and Seonah Kim, we have developed an online YSI Estimator. This tool is available from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) here.
YSI is also included in the Feedstock to Function Tool developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The Coordinating Research Council (CRC) has developed a PMI tool that incorporates YSI.