Experimental Investigation of Laminar Flame Speeds for Medium Calorific Gas With Various Amounts of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide Content at Gas Turbine Temperatures

Author(s):  
Ivan R. Sigfrid ◽  
Ronald Whiddon ◽  
Robert Collin ◽  
Jens Klingmann

It is expected that, in the future, gas turbines will be operated on gaseous fuels currently unutilized. The ability to predict the range of feasible fuels, and the extent to which existing turbines must be modified to accommodate these fuels, rests on the nature of these fuels in the combustion environment. Understanding the combustion behavior is aided by investigation of syngases of similar composition. As part of an ongoing project at the Lund University Departments of Thermal Power Engineering and Combustion Physics, to investigate syngases in gas turbine combustion, the laminar flame speed of five syngases (see table) have been measured. The syngases examined are of two groups. The first gas group (A), contains blends of H2, CO and CH4, with high hydrogen content. The group A gases exhibit a maximum flame speed at an equivalence ratio of approximately 1.4, and a flame speed roughly four times that of methane. The second gas group (B) contains mixtures of CH4 and H2 diluted with CO2. Group B gases exhibit maximum flame speed at an equivalence ratio of 1, and flame speeds about 3/4 that of methane. A long tube Bunsen-type burner was used and the conical flame was visualized by Schlieren imaging. The flame speeds were measured for a range of equivalence ratios using a constrained cone half-angle method. The equivalence ratio for measurements ranged from stable lean combustion to rich combustion for room temperature (25°C) and an elevated temperature representative of a gas turbine at full load (270°C). The experimental procedure was verified by methane laminar flame speed measurement; and, experimental results were compared against numerical simulations based on GRI 3.0, Hoyerman and San Diego chemical kinetic mechanisms using the DARS v2.02 combustion modeler. On examination, all measured laminar flame speeds at room temperature were higher than values predicted by the aforementioned chemical kinetic mechanisms, with the exception of group A gases, which were lower than predicted.

Author(s):  
Pablo Diaz Gomez Maqueo ◽  
Philippe Versailles ◽  
Gilles Bourque ◽  
Jeffrey M. Bergthorson

This study investigates the increase in methane and biogas flame reactivity enabled by the addition of syngas produced through fuel reforming. To isolate thermodynamic and chemical effects on the reactivity of the mixture, the burner simulations are performed with a constant adiabatic flame temperature of 1800 K. Compositions and temperatures are calculated with the chemical equilibrium solver of CANTERA® and the reactivity of the mixture is quantified using the adiabatic, freely-propagating premixed flame, and perfectly-stirred reactors of the CHEMKIN-Pro® software package. The results show that the produced syngas has a content of up to 30 % H2 with a temperature up to 950 K. When added to the fuel, it increases the laminar flame speed while maintaining a burning temperature of 1800 K. Even when cooled to 300 K, the laminar flame speed increases up to 30 % from the baseline of pure biogas. Hence, a system can be developed that controls and improves biogas flame stability under low reactivity conditions by varying the fraction of added syngas to the mixture. This motivates future experimental work on reforming technologies coupled with gas turbine exhausts to validate this numerical work.


Author(s):  
Shane Coogan ◽  
Xiang Gao ◽  
Aaron McClung ◽  
Wenting Sun

Existing kinetic mechanisms for natural gas combustion are not validated under supercritical oxy-fuel conditions because of the lack of experimental validation data. Our studies show that different mechanisms have different predictions under supercritical oxy-fuel conditions. Therefore, preliminary designers may experience difficulties when selecting a mechanism for a numerical model. This paper evaluates the performance of existing chemical kinetic mechanisms and produces a reduced mechanism for preliminary designers based on the results of the evaluation. Specifically, the mechanisms considered were GRI-Mech 3.0, USC-II, San Diego 204-10-04, NUIG-I, and NUIG-III. The set of mechanisms was modeled in Cantera and compared against the literature data closest to the application range. The high pressure data set included autoignition delay time in nitrogen and argon diluents up to 85 atm and laminar flame speed in helium diluent up to 60 atm. The high carbon dioxide data set included laminar flame speed with 70% carbon dioxide diluent and the carbon monoxide species profile in an isothermal reactor with up to 95% carbon dioxide diluent. All mechanisms performed adequately against at least one dataset. Among the evaluated mechanisms, USC-II has the best overall performance and is preferred over the other mechanisms for use in the preliminary design of supercritical oxy-combustors. This is a significant distinction; USC-II predicts slower kinetics than GRI-Mech 3.0 and San Diego 2014 at the combustor conditions expected in a recompression cycle. Finally, the global pathway selection method was used to reduce the USC-II model from 111 species, 784 reactions to a 27 species, 150 reactions mechanism. Performance of the reduced mechanism was verified against USC-II over the range relevant for high inlet temperature supercritical oxy-combustion.


Author(s):  
Charles L. Keesee ◽  
Bing Guo ◽  
Eric L. Petersen

Abstract New laminar flame speed experiments have been collected for multiple alternative liquid fuels. Understanding the combustion characteristics of these synthetic fuels is an important step in developing new chemical kinetics mechanisms that can be applied to real fuels. Included in this study are two synthetic Jet fuels: Syntroleum S-8 and Shell GTL. The precise composition of these fuels is known to change from sample to sample. Since these are low vapor pressure fuels, there are additional uncertainties in their introduction into gas-phase mixtures, leading to uncertainty in the mixture equivalence ratio. An in-situ laser absorption technique was implemented to verify the procedure for filling the vessel and to minimize and quantify the uncertainty in the experimental equivalence ratio. The diagnostic utilized a 3.39-μm HeNe laser in conjunction with Beer’s Law. The resulting spherically expanding flame experiments were conducted over a range of equivalence ratios from φ = 0.7 to φ = 1.5 at initial conditions of 1 atm and 403 K in the high-temperature, high-pressure constant-volume vessel at Texas A&M University. The experimental results show that both fuels have similar flame speeds with a peak value just under 60 cm/s. However, it is shown that when comparing the results from different data sets for these real fuels, equivalence ratio is not necessarily the best parameter to use. Fuel mole fraction may be a better parameter to use as it is independent of the average fuel molecule or fuel surrogate used to calculate equivalence ratio in these real fuel/air mixtures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 148 ◽  
pp. 154-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulio Cazzoli ◽  
Stefania Falfari ◽  
Gian Marco Bianchi ◽  
Claudio Forte

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 75-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan-Sebastián Gómez-Meyer ◽  
Subramanyam R Gollahalli ◽  
Ramkumar N. Parthasarathy ◽  
Jabid-Eduardo Quiroga

In this article, the flame speed values determined experimentally for laminar premixed flames of the vapors of two biofuels in air are presented. The laminar flame speed is a fundamental thermochemical property of fuels, and is essential for analyzing the flame propagation in practical devices, even those employing turbulent flames. The fuels obtained from transesterification of soy and canola oils are tested. Also, the diesel flames are studied to serve as a baseline for comparison. The experiments are performed with a tubular burner; pre-vaporized fuel is mixed with hot air and is ignited. The flame speed is determined at fuel-equivalence ratios of 1; 1,1 and 1,2 by recording the geometry of the flame. The experimental results show that the flame speed of biofuels is lower by about 15% than that of diesel. Also, the maximum value of flame speed is obtained at an equivalence ratio of approximately 1,1.


2019 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles L. Keesee ◽  
Bing Guo ◽  
Eric L. Petersen

Abstract New laminar flame speed experiments have been collected for two alternative liquid fuels. Understanding the combustion characteristics of these synthetic fuels is an important step in developing new chemical kinetics mechanisms that can be applied to real fuels. Included in this study are two synthetic Jet fuels: Syntroleum S-8 and Shell GTL. The precise composition of these fuels is known to change from sample to sample. Since these are low-vapor pressure fuels, there are additional uncertainties in their introduction into gas-phase mixtures, leading to uncertainty in the mixture equivalence ratio. An in-situ laser absorption technique was implemented to verify the procedure for filling the vessel and to minimize and quantify the uncertainty in the experimental equivalence ratio. The diagnostic utilized a 3.39-μm HeNe laser in conjunction with Beer's law. The resulting spherically expanding, laminar flame experiments were conducted over a range of equivalence ratios from φ = 0.7 to φ = 1.5 at initial conditions of 1 atm and 403 K in the high-temperature, high-pressure (HTHP) constant-volume vessel at Texas A&M University. The experimental results show that both fuels have similar flame speeds with a peak value just under 60 cm/s. However, it is shown that when comparing the results from different datasets for these real fuels, equivalence ratio may not be the best parameter to use. Fuel mole fraction may be a better parameter to use as it is independent of the average fuel molecule or fuel surrogate used to calculate equivalence ratio in these real fuel/air mixtures.


Author(s):  
Victor Burger ◽  
Andy Yates ◽  
Nicholas Savage ◽  
Owen Metcalf

The influence of fuel autoignition chemistry is known to be relevant when approaching the limits of lean blowout and lean ignition in a continuous combustion environment. This was investigated by employing four reference fuels having very different autoignition delay profiles but similar boiling points to interrogate various test environments and thereby to assess the relevance of the differences in autoignition chemistry. A combustion bomb apparatus was used to characterize the reference fuels together with a sample of commercial Jet A-1 for comparison. The measurements were cross-checked using a chemical kinetic simulation model. A continuous combustion rig was used to study the threshold ignition and blowout performance of the pre-vaporized reference fuels and a laminar flame speed bomb was used to study the influence of autoignition chemistry on normal, stoichiometric combustion and normal ignition conditions. In all the experiments, the results reflected the distinctive differences of the test fuels in terms of their autoignition delay timescales. The findings were interpreted against the background of the commercial jet fuel autoignition chemistry and the relevance of traditional autoignition delay metrics such as Octane or Cetane rating. Notwithstanding the influence of fuel evaporation and mixing timescales which can exert an overriding influence in a practical, gas turbine application, it was concluded that the fuel’s autoignition delay timescale also plays a very significant role in threshold operational situations.


2014 ◽  
Vol 699 ◽  
pp. 714-719
Author(s):  
Alaeldeen Altag Yousif ◽  
Shaharin Anwar Sulaiman

Accurate value of laminar flame speed is an important parameter of combustible mixtures. In this respect, experimental data are very useful for modeling improvement and validating chemical kinetic mechanisms. To achieve this, an experimental characterization on spherically expanding flames propagation of methane-air mixtures were carried out. Tests were conducted in constant volume cylindrical combustion chamber to measure stretched, unstretched laminar flame speed, laminar burning velocity, and flame stretch effect as quantified by the associated Markstein lengths. The mixtures of methane-air were ignited at extensive ranges of lean-to-rich equivalence ratios, under ambient pressure and temperature. This is achieved by high speed schlieren cine-photography for flames observation in the vessel. The results showed that the unstretched laminar burning velocity increased and the peak value of the unstretched laminar burning velocity shifted to the richer mixture side with the increase of equivalence ratio. The flame propagation speed showed different trends at different equivalence ratio for tested mixtures. It was found that the Markstein length was increased with the increase of equivalence ratio.


Author(s):  
Marissa Brower ◽  
Eric Petersen ◽  
Wayne Metcalfe ◽  
Henry J. Curran ◽  
Marc Füri ◽  
...  

Applications of natural gas and hydrogen co-firing have received increased attention in the gas turbine market, which aims at higher flexibility due to concerns over the availability of fuels. While much work has been done in the development of a fuels database and corresponding chemical kinetics mechanism for natural gas mixtures, there are nonetheless few if any data for mixtures with high levels of hydrogen at conditions of interest to gas turbines. The focus of the present paper is on gas turbine engines with primary and secondary reaction zones as represented in the Alstom and Rolls Royce product portfolio. The present effort includes a parametric study, a gas turbine model study, and turbulent flame speed predictions. Using a highly optimized chemical kinetics mechanism, ignition delay times and laminar burning velocities were calculated for fuels from pure methane to pure hydrogen and with natural gas/hydrogen mixtures. A wide range of engine-relevant conditions were studied: pressures from 1 to 30 atm, flame temperatures from 1600 to 2200 K, primary combustor inlet temperature from 300 to 900 K, and secondary combustor inlet temperatures from 900 to 1400 K. Hydrogen addition was found to increase the reactivity of hydrocarbon fuels at all conditions by increasing the laminar flame speed and decreasing the ignition delay time. Predictions of turbulent flame speeds from the laminar flame speeds show that hydrogen addition affects the reactivity more when turbulence is considered. This combined effort of industrial and university partners brings together the know-how of applied, as well as experimental and theoretical disciplines.


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