Impact of the Reaction Mechanism Model on Soot Growth and Oxidation in Laminar and Turbulent Flames

Author(s):  
Livia Tardelli ◽  
Benedetta Franzelli ◽  
Pedro Rodrigues ◽  
Nasser Darabiha

Abstract Numerical prediction of soot production in turbulent flames is extremely challenging, as it involves complex physical and chemical processes whose modeling presents today many uncertainties. The modeling of soot growth and oxidation reactions is a key aspect for soot prediction accuracy, as it may greatly contribute to the soot mass yield as numerically observed by Rodrigues et al. [1] in a turbulent non-premixed ethylene-airflame. Surface reactions are commonly described by a HACA-based model that is known to provide good agreement with experimental data in laminar premixed flames, while failing the description of laminar diffusion flames. A modification of the HACA-RC model [2], which is an extended version of the original HACA mechanism [3], is proposed here based on the work of Hwang et al. [4] in order to obtain a soot model that performs reasonably well on both premixed and diffusion laminar flames. To assess its accurary validations are performed on different laminar flames by comparison with available experimental data. Then, the impact of such modification on the prediction of turbulent flames is evaluated by performing two Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of a model gas turbine combustor using the new model and the reference HACA-RC model. The obtained results are compared to the experimental data in terms of soot volume fraction. Discrepancies between the two LES results are finally explained by analyzing the different source terms of soot production.

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3671
Author(s):  
Subrat Garnayak ◽  
Subhankar Mohapatra ◽  
Sukanta K. Dash ◽  
Bok Jik Lee ◽  
V. Mahendra Reddy

This article presents the results of computations on pilot-based turbulent methane/air co-flow diffusion flames under the influence of the preheated oxidizer temperature ranging from 293 to 723 K at two operating pressures of 1 and 3 atm. The focus is on investigating the soot formation and flame structure under the influence of both the preheated air and combustor pressure. The computations were conducted in a 2D axisymmetric computational domain by solving the Favre averaged governing equation using the finite volume-based CFD code Ansys Fluent 19.2. A steady laminar flamelet model in combination with GRI Mech 3.0 was considered for combustion modeling. A semi-empirical acetylene-based soot model proposed by Brookes and Moss was adopted to predict soot. A careful validation was initially carried out with the measurements by Brookes and Moss at 1 and 3 atm with the temperature of both fuel and air at 290 K before carrying out further simulation using preheated air. The results by the present computation demonstrated that the flame peak temperature increased with air temperature for both 1 and 3 atm, while it reduced with pressure elevation. The OH mole fraction, signifying reaction rate, increased with a rise in the oxidizer temperature at the two operating pressures of 1 and 3 atm. However, a reduced value of OH mole fraction was observed at 3 atm when compared with 1 atm. The soot volume fraction increased with air temperature as well as pressure. The reaction rate by soot surface growth, soot mass-nucleation, and soot-oxidation rate increased with an increase in both air temperature and pressure. Finally, the fuel consumption rate showed a decreasing trend with air temperature and an increasing trend with pressure elevation.


Author(s):  
Pavan Prakash Duvvuri ◽  
Rajesh Kumar Shrivastava ◽  
Sheshadri Sreedhara

Stringent emission legislations and growing health concerns have contributed to the evolution of soot modeling in diesel engines from simple empirical relations to methods involving detailed kinetics and complex aerosol dynamics. In this paper, four different soot models have been evaluated for the high temperature, high pressure combusting dodecane spray cases of engine combustion network (ECN) spray A which mimics engine-relevant conditions. The soot models considered include an empirical, a multistep, a method of moments based, and a discrete sectional method soot model. Two experimental cases with ambient oxygen volume of 21% and 15% have been modeled. A good agreement between simulations and experiments for vapor penetration and heat release rate has been obtained. Quasi-steady soot volume fraction contours for the four soot models have been compared with experiments. Contours of the species and source terms involved in soot modeling have also been compared for a better understanding of soot processes. The empirical soot model results in higher magnitude and spread of soot due to a lack of modeling framework for oxidation through OH species. Among the four models studied, the multistep soot model has been observed to provide the most promising agreement with the experimental data in terms of distribution of soot and location of peak soot volume fraction. Due to a two-way coupling of soot models, the detailed models predict an upstream location for soot as compared to the multi-step soot model which is one way coupled. A significant difference (of an order of magnitude) in the concentration of PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) precursor between multistep and detailed soot models has been observed because of precursor consumption due to the coupling of detailed soot models with chemical kinetics. It is recommended that kinetic schemes, especially those concerning PAH, be validated with experimental data with a kinetics-coupled soot model.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Makhija ◽  
Krishna Sesha Giri

Abstract Soot volume fraction predictions through simulations carried out on OpenFOAM® are reported in diffusion flames with ethylene fuel. A single-step global reaction mechanism for gas-phase species with an infinitely fast chemistry assumption is employed. Traditionally soot formation includes inception, nucleation, agglomeration, growth, and oxidation processes, and the individual rates are solved to determine soot levels. However, in the present work, the detailed model is replaced with the soot formation and oxidation rates, defined as analytical functions of mixture fraction and temperature, where the net soot formation rate can be defined as the sum of individual soot formation and oxidation rates. The soot formation/oxidation rates are modelled as surface area-independent processes. The flame is modelled by solving conservation equations for continuity, momentum, total energy, and species mass fractions. Additionally, separate conservation equations are solved to compute the mixture fraction and soot mass fraction consisting of source terms that are identical and account for the mixture fraction consumption/production due to soot. As a consequence, computational time can be reduced drastically. This is a quantitative approach that gives the principal soot formation regions depending on the combination of local mixture fraction and temperature. The implemented model is based on the smoke point height, an empirical method to predict the sooting propensity based on fuel stoichiometry. The model predicts better soot volume fraction in buoyant diffusion flames. It was also observed that the optimal fuel constants to evaluate soot formation rates for different fuels change with fuel stoichiometry. However, soot oxidation strictly occurs in a particular region in the flame; hence, they are independent of fuel. The numerical results are compared with the experimental measurements, showing an excellent agreement for the velocity and temperature. Qualitative agreements are observed for the soot volume fraction predictions. A close agreement was obtained in smoke point prediction for the overventilated flame. An established theory through simulations was also observed, which states that the amount of soot production is proportional to the fuel flow rate. Further validations underscore the predictive capabilities. Model improvements are also reported with better predictions of soot volume fractions through modifications to the model constants based on mixture fraction range.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nemanja Ceranic

Soot models have been investigated for several decades and many fundamental models exist that prescribe soot formation in agreement with experiments and theories. However, due to the complex nature of soot formation, not all pathways have been fully characterized. This work has numerically studied the influence that aliphatic based inception models have on soot formation for coflow laminar diffusion flames. CoFlame is the in-house parallelized FORTRAN code that was used to conduct this research. It solves the combustion fluid dynamic conservation equations for a variety of coflow laminar diffusion flames. New soot inception models have been developed for specific aliphatics in conjunction with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon based inception. The purpose of these models was not to be completely fundamental in nature, but more so a proof-of-concept in that an aliphatic based mechanism could account for soot formation deficiencies that exist with just PAH based inception. The aliphatic based inception models show potential to enhance predicative capability by increasing the prediction of the soot volume fraction along the centerline without degrading the prediction along the pathline of maximum soot. Additionally, the surface reactivity that was used to achieve these results lied closer in the range of numerically derived optimal values as compared to the surface reactivity that was needed to match peak soot concentrations without the aliphatic based inception models.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (26) ◽  
pp. 29547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence R. Meyer ◽  
Benjamin R. Halls ◽  
Naibo Jiang ◽  
Mikhail N. Slipchenko ◽  
Sukesh Roy ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Kevin Torres Monclard ◽  
Olivier Gicquel ◽  
Ronan Vicquelin

Abstract The effect of soot radiation modeling, pressure, and level of soot volume fraction are investigated in two ethylene-air turbulent flames: a jet flame at atmospheric pressure studied at Sandia, and a confined pressurized flame studied at DLR. Both cases have previously been computed with large-eddy simulations coupled with thermal radiation. The present study aims at determining and analyzing the thermal radiation field for different models from these numerical results. A Monte-Carlo solver based on the Emission Reciprocity Method is used to solve the radiative transfer equation with detailed gas and soot properties in both configurations. The participating gases properties are described by an accurate narrowband ck model. Emission, absorption, and scattering from soot particles are accounted for. Two formulations of the soot refractive index are considered: a constant value and a wavelength formulation dependency. This is combined with different models for soot radiative properties: gray, Rayleigh theory, Rayleigh-Debye-Gans theory for fractal aggregates. The effects of soot radiative scattering is often neglected since their contribution is expected to be small. This contribution is determined quantitatively in different scenarios, showing great sensitivity to the soot particles morphology. For the same soot volume fraction, scattering from larger aggregates is found to modify the radiative heat transfer noticeably. Such a finding outlines the need for detailed information on soot particles. Finally, the role of soot volume fraction and pressure on radiative interactions between both solid and gaseous phases is investigated.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongsheng Guo ◽  
Stephanie Trottier ◽  
Matthew R. Johnson ◽  
Gregory J. Smallwood

The sooting propensity of laminar diffusion flames employing ethylene/methane mixture fuel is investigated by numerical simulation. Detailed gas phase chemistry and moments method are used to describe the chemical reaction process and soot particle dynamics, respectively. The numerical model captures the primary features experimentally observed previously. At constant temperatures of air and fuel mixture, both maximum soot volume fraction and soot yield monotonically decrease with increasing the fraction of carbon from methane in the fuel mixture. However, when the temperatures of air and fuel mixture are preheated so that the adiabatic temperatures of all flames are same, the variation of the maximum soot yield becomes higher than what would be expected from a linear combination of the flames of pure ethylene and pure methane, showing a synergistic phenomenon in soot formation. Further analysis of the details of the numerical results suggests that the synergistic phenomenon is caused by the combined effects of the variations in the concentrations of acetylene (C2H2) and methyl radical (CH3). When the fraction of carbon from methane in fuel mixture increases, the concentration of C2H2 monotonically decreases, whereas that of methyl radical increases, resulting in a synergistic phenomenon in the variation of propargyl (C3H3) radical concentration due to the reactions C2H2 + CH3 = PC3H4 + H and PC3H4 + H = C3H3 + H2. This synergistic phenomenon causes a qualitatively similar variation trend in the concentration of pyrene (A4) owing to the reaction paths C3H3 → A1 (benzene) → A2 (naphthalene) → A3 (phenanthrene) → A4. Consequently, the synergistic effect occurs for soot inception and PAH condensation rates, leading to the synergistic phenomenon in soot yield. The similar synergistic phenomenon is not observed in the variation of peak soot volume fraction, since the maximum surface growth rate monotonically decreases, as the fraction of carbon from methane in fuel mixture increases.


1983 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Beier ◽  
P. J. Pagni

A multiwavelength laser transmission technique is used to determine soot volume fraction fields and aproximate particle size distributions in a forced flow combusting boundary layer. Measurements are made in diffusion flames of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and five liquid hydrocarbon fuels (n-heptane, iso-octane, cyclohexane, cyclohexene, and toluene) with ambient oxygen mass fractions in the range of 0.23 ≲ Y0∞ ≲ 0.50. Soot is observed in a region between the pyrolyzing fuel surface and the flame zone. Soot volume fraction increases monotonically with Y0∞, e.g., n-heptane and PMMA are similar with soot volume fractions, fν, ranging from fν ∼ 5 × 10−7 at Y0∞ = 0.23 to fν ∼ 5 × 10−6 at Y0∞ = 0.50. For an oxygen mass fraction the same as air, Y0∞ = 0.23, soot volume fractions are approximately the same as values previously reported in pool fires and a free combusting boundary layer. However, the shape of the fν profile changes with more soot near the flame in forced flow than in free flow due to the different y-velocity fields in these two systems. For all fuels tested, a most probable particle radius is between 20 nm and 80 nm, and does not appear to change substantially with location, fuel, or oxygen mass fraction.


2017 ◽  
Vol 140 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandkumar Makwana ◽  
Suresh Iyer ◽  
Milton Linevsky ◽  
Robert Santoro ◽  
Thomas Litzinger ◽  
...  

The objective of this study is to understand the effects of fuel volatility on soot emissions. This effect is investigated in two experimental configurations: a jet flame and a model gas turbine combustor. The jet flame provides information about the effects of fuel on the spatial development of aromatics and soot in an axisymmetric, co-flow, laminar flame. The data from the model gas turbine combustor illustrate the effect of fuel volatility on net soot production under conditions similar to an actual engine at cruise. Two fuels with different boiling points are investigated: n-heptane/n-dodecane mixture and n-hexadecane/n-dodecane mixture. The jet flames are nonpremixed and rich premixed flames in order to have fuel conditions similar to those in the primary zone of an aircraft engine combustor. The results from the jet flames indicate that the peak soot volume fraction produced in the n-hexadecane fuel is slightly higher as compared to the n-heptane fuel for both nonpremixed and premixed flames. Comparison of aromatics and soot volume fraction in nonpremixed and premixed flames shows significant differences in the spatial development of aromatics and soot along the downstream direction. The results from the model combustor indicate that, within experiment uncertainty, the net soot production is similar in both n-heptane and n-hexadecane fuel mixtures. Finally, we draw conclusions about important processes for soot formation in gas turbine combustor and what can be learned from laboratory-scale flames.


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