Abstract
Thermal deterioration of fuel due to long-term storage influences engine performance and causes malfunctions. Fuel stability is usually evaluated via heat resistance and thermal stability during a brief heat shock at high temperature; storage stability in this scenario means that there is very little change in the quality of the fuel during long-term storage. In addition, rubber-based products such as oil seals, O-rings, and rubber hoses can influence the quality of the fuel. When these rubber products are in contact with fuel, they can swell, mechanically weaken, and occasionally crack, thus leaking low molar weight rubber and additives including plasticizer and antioxidant into the fuel to degrade its properties and shorten its useful lifetime. This study determines the thermal stabilities of three kinds of synthetic fuels by evaluating their low temperature kinematic viscosities, chemical composition changes via GC analyses, gross heat of combustion, and color changes. We evaluate the compression set of O-rings by immersing one NBR and two FKM rubber O-rings in the three synthetic fuel samples in airtight containers at variable storage temperatures for six months; from this, we estimate the lifetimes of the O-rings using the Power law model. There were very little changes in the chemical compositions and gross heat of combustion after six months of the experiment. The lifetimes are thus dependent on the materials of the rubber products, and in particular, the FKM O-ring was calculated to have a theoretical lifetime of 200 to 5,700 years. These results indicate that the synthetic fuels maintain their physical properties even after long-term storage at high temperatures, and the FKM O-ring is suitable for long-term sealing of these fuels.
