Numerical study of inlet air conditions on methane flameless combustion characteristics

Abstract

Abstract The current study investigates the influence of inlet air momentum and temperature for flameless characteristics. Three-dimensional computations were implemented by ANSYS FLUENT. A small-scale experimental combustor geometry was used for validation study. Turbulence modelling was performed by RNG k- ε model and the GRI-Eddy Dissipation Concept (GRI-EDC) model was used for the combustion modelling. The influence of inlet air velocity was investigated through using different air jet diameters at constant flow rate. Five different air jet diameters (4,6,8,10 and 12 mm) were studied. It was found that decreasing air jet diameter leads to an increase in the exhaust gas recirculation which reserve in mixture dilution (low O2 content mixture) subsequently, the reaction rate decreases which support the flameless mode creation. Also, this recirculated gas participates in heating up of fresh reactants which make the mixture tends to complete combustion. The influence of combustion air preheating temperature on NO and CO emissions were studied. CO and NO concentration were decreased with reducing the temperature of inlet preheated combustion air.