LAUSR

High-speed flight is limited by the amount of heat absorbed by the aviation fuel in a thermal management system. One approach to increase the thermal capacity of the fuel is via endothermic heterogeneous catalysis within the heat exchanger (HEX). To optimize such chemistry, better tools are needed to probe the chemical composition inside the HEX in situ. Towards this aim, we demonstrate the first on-line analysis of supercritical fuel surrogates (n-hexane and n-dodecane) over a zeolite catalyst (H-ZSM-5) using tandem mass spectrometry (MS). In our approach, a supersonic expansion is generated directly from the supercritical state (200-1000 °C and 400-1000 psi) of the neat fluid to capture a “snapshot” of the reactive intermediates and products inside the reactor by isolating these species in the gas phases. A molecular beam is generated, which is ionized by 10 eV EI, and the mass spectrum is acquired using a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. Based on precursor scans, we distinguish between EI fragments...