A mechanistic model of fuel additive function and performance: Nanoparticle-fuel interactions in future marine fuels

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The marine sector supports 80% of global trade and is under pressure to reduce fuel emissions. One such step is to reduce the sulphur content in fuel oils, with the IMO MARPOL 2020 legislation limiting fuel sulphur content to 0.5 % (1). As these regulations get more challenging to meet, the sector is moving towards future fuels which will use heavy fuel oils (HFO) or very low sulphur fuel oils (VLSFO) as a pilot fuel mixed with ammonia, methane or hydrogen. To achieve high fuel and engine performance, nanoparticle additives are being considered and designed to interact with impurities, incombustible products, and to catalyse combustion. Currently the project is focused on understanding the interactions between nanoparticles and asphaltenes, a heavy component of fuel that is prone to aggregation and deposition. The prevention of deposits is crucial for avoiding performance deterioration in the engine over long timescales. Dynamic light scattering (DLS) is used to study the aggregation kinetics of asphaltenes, exploring the effects of nanoparticle size and surface chemistry to prevent asphaltene cluster formation in the fuel. From this insight, surface techniques such as quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) will be used to determine the process of deposit formation and how those nanoparticles may affect deposit composition and amount. With these techniques established the project will begin to explore fuel blends of VLSFO/HFO and ammonia, to determine how the addition of such alternative fuels impact the function and performance of the nanoparticle additives. A further progression will be to introduce more realistic conditions using a high-temperature micro-reactor and molecular modelling of nanoparticle-fuel interactions to understand the mechanism of action of these nanoparticle fuel additives and their effect on deposit formation in the engine.