Kerosene fuels such as Jet-A and JP-8 are traditionally used in gas turbines and jet engines.Recently,these fuels are also considered for ground vehicles utilizing diesel engines.The spray combustion process in diesel engines requires detailed characterization of the ignition delay of the fuels used for the preparation of stratified fuel-air charge.Ignition delay phenomenon is dominated by the fuel heating and evaporating spray process.For computational modeling of the spray combustion processes,it is essential to have accurate values of fuel thermophysical and chemical kinetics properties.Real kerosene fuels are typically composed of hundreds to thousands of components and are not feasible to be used in multicomponent spray combustion calculations.The object of this study is to develop a surrogate fuel,composed on a few components,to mimic the heating,evaporating and ignition behaviors of the real fuel.To this end,we have utilized a recently developed inversed batch distillation methodology to select a group hydrocarbon species that closely match the experimental distillation curve of a Jet-A(POST-4658)blend.For chemical kinetics target,a multi-component skeleton reaction mechanism of 231 species and 5591 reactions was used to predict ignition delay times with satisfactory results.From the hydrocarbon groups of typical kerosene fuels of linear paraffins,cyclo-paraffins and aromatics,we have identified the 4-componet surrogate fuel as: n-dodecane/iso-cetane/trans-decalin/toluene(mole fraction: 0.3/0.36/0.246/0.094).Droplet heating,evaporation and ignition process using the current unified surrogate will be presented and discussed.