Skip to main Communities My dashboard Log in Sign up California State University, Fullerton Theses & Dissertations Published April 16, 2026 | Version v1 Thesis Open EVAPORATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SURROGATE FUEL N-DECANE UNDER FORCED AND NATURAL CONVECTION Authors/Creators Rodriguez, Bryan Contributors Supervisor (3): Tran, Justin Chin Ngo, Chean Wang, Xinyi Description The goal for this work was to conduct droplet evaporation experiments on the surrogate fuel n-decane with forced convection in room temperature conditions. The fan speeds varied from 0.0 m/s, representing natural convection, and up to 4.5 m/s. This work was a continuation of previous research conducted for the SPARC Center at CSUF, in collaboration with Clemson University. The n-decane droplet size varied from 0.86 mm to 1.15 mm in diameter and was suspended in a cross fiber setup that held the droplet in a spherical shape. Forced convection was generated at one end of a cylindrical enclosure where on the opposite end the cross fibers were held on a horizontal plane. Backlight was used to produce a shadow of the droplet when recorded with a digital camera, which had a resolution of 2 µm per pixel. A MATLAB program was made that approximated the diameters of the droplets using the perpendicular chords theorem with two measured chords on the droplet image. Results were further processed and the d 2 law of evaporation was seen to hold throughout natural and forced convection trials. Natural convection results generally showed the evaporation rate constant increased with larger droplet sizes, although deviations from this trend at smaller sizes were attributed to capillary effects from the cross fiber setup. The forced convection results showed a linear increase in the evaporation rate constants at any given droplet size. At the highest fan speed, the evaporation rate constant increased 345% to 626% from the natural convection trials, depending on the initial droplet size. These forced convection results on n-decane can serve as a baseline for future research. Files 31 2026-04-15 Rodriguez Thesis FINAL.pdf Files (2.2 MB) Name Size Download all 31 2026-04-15 Rodriguez Thesis FINAL.pdf md5:c42fc65fbb4b89175715698480cb8ede 2.2 MB Preview Download 23 Views 12 Downloads Show more details All versions This version Views Total views 23 23 Downloads Total downloads 12 12 Data volume Total data volume 30.7 MB 30.7 MB More info on how stats are collected.... Versions External resources Indexed in OpenAIRE Communities Keywords and subjects Keywords n-decane droplet evaporation forced convection surrogate fuel d2 law Details DOI DOI Badge DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19601888 Markdown [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19601888) reStructuredText .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19601888.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19601888 HTML <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19601888"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19601888.svg" alt="DOI"></a> Image URL https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19601888.svg Target URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19601888 Resource type Thesis Publisher Zenodo Thesis California State University, Fullerton Languages English Rights License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. Read more Citation Export Technical metadata Created April 17, 2026 Modified April 17, 2026 Jump up About About Policies Infrastructure Principles Projects Roadmap Contact Blog Blog Support Help FAQ Developers REST API OAI-PMH Contribute GitHub Donate Funded by Powered by CERN Data Centre & InvenioRDM Status Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms of Use This site uses cookies. Find out more on how we use cookies Accept all cookies Accept only essential cookies