PURE AMMONIA COMBUSTION IN A BIDIRECTIONAL SWIRLING FLOW

Abstract

The paper reports on the new pure ammonia combustion technology based on a bidirectional swirling flow formation. This technology allows for avoiding the application of such additional efforts as fuel preheating and blending, oxidizer modification, and plasma assistance normally required for ammonia combustion. Experiments showed that pure ammonia combustion in a bidirectional swirling flow is possible at both lean and rich operation modes. The lowest achieved value of the equivalence ratio is 0.503 compared to conventional and swirl combustors where it is equal to 0.8. This became possible due to the toroidal geometry of the bidirectional vortex chamber where convective fuel preheating occurs as a natural process and the flame front surface area is increased. The presented results allow consideration of bidirectional combustors for use in modern power plants where ammonia is applied as a hydrogen-containing fuel.