Experimental measurement and prediction of thermal conductivity of fatty acid ethyl esters: ethyl butyrate and ethyl caproate

Biodiesel is expected to replace diesel because of its environmental friendliness. Biodiesel is mainly composed of fatty acid methyl esters (FAMEs) and fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEEs). Thermophysical properties of fuels are essential parameters in the industrial applications. As one of the most important thermophysical properties, thermal conductivity of fuels is essential in the design of heat transfer system and the modeling of engine's temperature distribution, so it is of great importance to measure thermal conductivity of FAEEs. In this paper, thermal conductivity of two FAEEs, ethyl butyrate (EeC4:0) and ethyl caproate (EeC6:0) were measured by transient hot-wire method, the temperature and pressure range is from 293.15 to 523.15 K and 0.1 to 15.0 MPa, the experimental data were fitted by a dimensionless polynomial as a function of temperature and pressure. AADs of measured data and polynomial are 0.35 % for EeC4:0 and 0.31 % for EeC6:0, respectively. Furthermore, the experimental data are compared with literature data, the results show that the present data agree well with literature data. In addition, several predictive models (Latini model, Sastri model, Liu model, Liu model with refitted parameters) are used to describe the data, the comparison shows that Liu model with re-fitted parameters describes the data best.