The Fuel Optimizer: A Data-Driven Numerical Framework for Formulation of Aviation Turbine Fuel

Abstract: The Fuel Optimizer is an inverse design framework for sustainable aviation fuels that starts from a user-defined merit function and identifies the optimal combination of chemical species or hydrocarbon families that optimize a combination of targets. As a case study, a database of fuel blends meeting selected property standards was simulated in a reactor model to obtain pollutant emissions at cruise conditions. A surrogate model was developed to reduce the computational cost of evaluating candidate blends, taking fuel composition as input and predicting emissions as output. A genetic algorithm was used to optimize fuel formulation according to two merit functions designed to break the nitrogen oxides - CO trade-off, and minimize pollutant emissions over the landing-and-take-off cycle. Constraints included selected property standards (including seal swelling) and composition limits. Fuel candidates from the framework outperformed the training database across all merit functions, and the optimal candidates were validated through reactor simulations.