Modeling the Formation of Pollutant Emissions in Large-Bore, Lean-Burn Gas Engines

Author(s):  
Anamol Pundle ◽  
David G. Nicol ◽  
Philip C. Malte ◽  
Joel D. Hiltner

This paper discusses chemical kinetic modeling used to analyze the formation of pollutant emissions in large-bore, lean-burn gas reciprocating engines. Pollutants considered are NOx, CO, HCHO, and UHC. A quasi-dimensional model, built as a chemical reactor network (CRN), is described. In this model, the flame front is treated as a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) followed by a plug flow reactor (PFR), and reaction in the burnt gas is modeled assuming a batch reactor of constant-pressure and fixed-mass for each crank angle increment. The model treats full chemical kinetics. Engine heat loss is treated by incorporating the Woschni model into the CRN. The mass burn rate is selected so that the modeled cylinder pressure matches the experiment pressure trace. Originally, the model was developed for large, low speed, two-stoke, lean-burn engines. However, recently, the model has been formatted for the four-stroke, open-chamber, lean-burn engine. The focus of this paper is the application of the model to a four-stroke engine. This is a single-cylinder non-production variant of a heavy duty lean-burn engine of about 5 liters cylinder displacement Engine speed is 1500 RPM. Key findings of this work are the following. 1) Modeled NOx and CO are found to agree closely with emission measurements for this engine over a range of relative air-fuel ratios tested. 2) This modeling shows the importance of including N2O chemistry in the NOx calculation. For λ = 1.7, the model indicates that about 30% of the NOx emitted is formed by the N2O mechanism, with the balance from the Zeldovich mechanism. 3) The modeling shows that the CO and HCHO emissions arise from partial oxidation late in the expansion stroke as unburned charge remaining mixes into the burnt gas. 4) Model generated plots of HCHO versus CH4 emission for the four-stroke engine are in agreement with field data for large-bore, lean-burn, gas reciprocating engines. Also, recent engine tests show the correlation of UHC and CO emissions to crevice volume. These tests suggest that HCHO emissions also are affected by crevice flows through partial oxidation of UHC late in the expansion stroke.

Author(s):  
Di Wang ◽  
Wenjun Kong ◽  
Yuhua Ai ◽  
Baorui Wang

A research program is in development in China in order to realize a demonstrator of combined cooling heating and power system (CCHP) with net electrical output around 100kW by using of a can-type micro gas turbine. In this paper, numerical simulations were completed to investigate the pollutant emissions in a can-type low NOx gas turbine combustor. Based on the analysis of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results, a Chemical Reactor Network (CRN) model was set up to simulate the pollutant emissions in the combustor with detailed gas-phase chemical kinetic mechanism of GRI-Mech 3.0. The CRN consists of a number of ideal reactors of the perfectly stirred reactors (PSR) and plug flow reactors (PFR) in series and parallel structures. Two types of CRN models were designed. One is relatively simple, another is more complex. The results show that the complex CRN model corresponds with the actual combustion process better. The trends of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO) varying with the equivalence ratio were conducted. Effects of the inlet temperature and pressure on NOx and CO emissions were also presented in this paper. At last, the numerical results are compared with the experimental results.


Author(s):  
G. Arvind Rao ◽  
Yeshayahou Levy ◽  
Ephraim J. Gutmark

Flameless combustion (FC) is one of the most promising techniques of reducing harmful emissions from combustion systems. FC is a combustion phenomenon that takes place at low O2 concentration and high inlet reactant temperature. This unique combination results in a distributed combustion regime with a lower adiabatic flame temperature. The paper focuses on investigating the chemical kinetics of an prototype combustion chamber built at the university of Cincinnati with an aim of establishing flameless regime and demonstrating the applicability of FC to gas turbine engines. A Chemical reactor model (CRM) has been built for emulating the reactions within the combustor. The entire combustion chamber has been divided into appropriate number of Perfectly Stirred Reactors (PSRs) and Plug Flow Reactors (PFRs). The interconnections between these reactors and the residence times of these reactors are based on the PIV studies of the combustor flow field. The CRM model has then been used to predict the combustor emission profile for various equivalence ratios. The results obtained from CRM model show that the emission from the combustor are quite less at low equivalence ratios and have been found to be in reasonable agreement with experimental observations. The chemical kinetic analysis gives an insight on the role of vitiated combustion gases in suppressing the formation of pollutants within the combustion process.


Author(s):  
Fuqiang Liu ◽  
Yong Mu ◽  
Cunxi Liu ◽  
Jinhu Yang ◽  
Yanhui Mao ◽  
...  

The low NOX emission technology has become an important feature of advanced aviation engine. A wide range of applications attempt to take advantage of the fact that staged combustion operating under lean-premixed-prevaporized (LPP) conditions can significantly decrease pollution emissions and improve combustion efficiency. In this paper a scheme with fuel centrally staged and multi-point injection is proposed. The mixing of fuel and air is improved, and the flame temperature is typically low in combustion zone, minimizing the formation of nitrogen oxides (NOX), especially thermal NOX. In terms of the field distribution of equivalence ratio and temperature obtained from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), a chemical reactor network (CRN), including several different ideal reactor, namely perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) and plug flow reactor (PFR), is constructed to simulate the combustion process. The influences of the pilot equivalence ratio and percentage of pilot/main fuel on NOX and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions were studied by Chemical CRN model. Then the NOX emission in the staged combustor was researched experimentally. The effects of the amount of pilot fuel and primary fuel on pollution emissions were obtained by using gas analyzer. Finally, the effects of pilot fuel proportion on NOX emission were discussed in detail by comparing predicts of CRN and experimental results.


Author(s):  
Sajjad Yousefian ◽  
Gilles Bourque ◽  
Rory F. D. Monaghan

Many sources of uncertainty exist when emissions are modeled for a gas turbine combustion system. They originate from uncertain inputs, boundary conditions, calibration, or lack of sufficient fidelity in a model. In this paper, a nonintrusive polynomial chaos expansion (NIPCE) method is coupled with a chemical reactor network (CRN) model using Python to quantify uncertainties of NOx emission in a premixed burner. The first objective of uncertainty quantification (UQ) in this study is development of a global sensitivity analysis method based on the NIPCE method to capture aleatory uncertainty on NOx emission due to variation of operating conditions. The second objective is uncertainty analysis (UA) of NOx emission due to uncertain Arrhenius parameters in a chemical kinetic mechanism to study epistemic uncertainty in emission modeling. A two-reactor CRN consisting of a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) and a plug flow reactor (PFR) is constructed in this study using Cantera to model NOx emission in a benchmark premixed burner under gas turbine operating conditions. The results of uncertainty and sensitivity analysis (SA) using NIPCE based on point collocation method (PCM) are then compared with the results of advanced Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). A set of surrogate models is also developed based on the NIPCE approach and compared with the forward model in Cantera to predict NOx emissions. The results show the capability of NIPCE approach for UQ using a limited number of evaluations to develop a UQ-enabled emission prediction tool for gas turbine combustion systems.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiliang ‘Luke’ Wang ◽  
Zhang Zhang ◽  
Amy Kan ◽  
Mason Tomson

Abstract Ferrous sulfide (FeS) precipitation is a severe problem and the significance of this problem is increased in the shale gas and oil production due to the potentially increasing biologically and thermally induced sulfide production. Although FeS scale is ubiquitous, little is understood about its precipitation and inhibition properties due to experimental difficulties. In conventional research, we used a batch reactor to study the precipitation kinetics and inhibition of FeS formation. In order to assess scaling risk in pipes, a new plug flow reactor was developed under anoxic condition at different ionic strength (IS), pH and temperature to enable more reliable study of FeS precipitation kinetics at high surface to solution ratio. The precipitation kinetics of FeS is successfully fitted by a second/pseudo-first order rate equations for batch/plug flow systems. The rate of precipitation increases with increasing pH and temperature, and decreases with increasing IS. Commercial scale inhibitors, citrate, EDTA and other chelating agents have been tested for their inhibition effects on FeS precipitation. The new plug flow apparatus not only adds reliable data to the limited database of scaling kinetics in realistic flowing pipes, but also supplies a new method to study the effect of inhibitors in oil production systems. The research outcomes will contribute to the prediction of FeS scaling risk under different brine composition and well conditions.


1997 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Steele ◽  
A. C. Jarrett ◽  
P. C. Malte ◽  
J. H. Tonouchi ◽  
D. G. Nicol

The formation of NOx in lean-premixed, high-intensity combustion is examined as a function of several of the relevant variables. The variables are the combustion temperature and pressure, fuel type, combustion zone residence time, mixture inlet temperature, reactor surface-to-volume ratio, and inlet jet size. The effects of these variables are examined by using jet-stirred reactors and chemical reactor modeling. The atmospheric pressure experiments have been completed and are fully reported. The results cover the combustion temperature range (measured) of 1500 to 1850 K, and include the following four fuels: methane, ethylene, propane, and carbon monoxide/hydrogen mixtures. The reactor residence time is varied from 1.7 to 7.4 ms, with most of the work done at 3.5 ms. The mixture inlet temperature is taken as 300 and 600 K, and two inlet jet sizes are used. Elevated pressure experiments are reported for pressures up to 7.1 atm for methane combustion at 4.0 ms with a mixture inlet temperature of 300 K. Experimental results are compared to chemical reactor modeling. This is accomplished by using a detailed chemical kinetic mechanism in a chemical reactor model, consisting of a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) followed by a plug flow reactor (PFR). The methane results are also compared to several laboratory-scale and industrial-scale burners operated at simulated gas turbine engine conditions.


Author(s):  
T. Le Cong ◽  
P. Dagaut ◽  
G. Dayma

The oxidation of methane-based fuels was studied experimentally in a fused-silica jet-stirred reactor (JSR) operating at 1–10atm, over the temperature range of 900–1450K, from fuel-lean to fuel-rich conditions. Similar experiments were performed in the presence of carbon dioxide or syngas (CO∕H2). A previously proposed kinetic reaction mechanism updated for modeling the oxidation of hydrogen, CO, methane, methanol, formaldehyde, and natural gas over a wide range of conditions including JSR, flame, shock tube, and plug flow reactor was used. A detailed chemical kinetic modeling of the present experiments was performed yielding a good agreement between the modeling, the present data and literature burning velocities, and ignition data. Reaction path analyses were used to delineate the important reactions influencing the kinetic of oxidation of the fuels in the presence of variable amounts of CO2. The kinetic reaction scheme proposed helps understand the effect of the additives on the oxidation of methane.


Author(s):  
R. C. Steele ◽  
A. C. Jarrett ◽  
P. C. Malte ◽  
J. H. Tonouchi ◽  
D. G. Nicol

The formation of NOx in lean-premixed, high-intensity combustion is examined as a function of several of the relevant variables. The variables are the combustion temperature and pressure, fuel-type, combustion zone residence time, mixture inlet temperature, reactor surface-to-volume ratio, and inlet jet size. The effects of these variables are examined by using jet-stirred reactors and chemical reactor modeling. The atmospheric pressure experiments have been completed and are fully reported. The results cover the combustion temperature range (measured) of 1500 to 1850K, and include the following four fuels: methane, ethylene, propane, and carbon monoxide/hydrogen mixtures. The reactor residence time is varied from 1.7 to 7.4ms, with most of the work done at 3.5ms. The mixture inlet temperature is taken as 300 and 600K, and two inlet jet sizes are used. Elevated pressure experiments are reported for pressures up to 7.1atm for methane combustion at 4.0ms with a mixture inlet temperature of 300K. Experimental results are compared to chemical reactor modeling. This is accomplished by using a detailed chemical kinetic mechanism in a chemical reactor model, consisting of a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) followed by a plug flow reactor (PFR). The methane results are also compared to several laboratory-scale and industrial-scale burners operated at simulated gas turbine engine conditions.


Catalysts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Thomas Lenk ◽  
Adrian Gärtner ◽  
Klaus Stöwe ◽  
Thomas Schwarz ◽  
Christian Breuer ◽  
...  

A unique high-throughput approach to identify new catalysts for total oxidation of methane from the exhaust gas of biogas-operated lean-burn engines is presented. The approach consists of three steps: (1) A primary screening using emission-corrected Infrared Thermography (ecIRT). (2) Validation in a conventional plug flow gas phase reactor using a model exhaust gas containing CH4, O2, CO, CO2, NO, NO2, N2O, SO2, H2O. (3) Ageing tests using a simplified exhaust gas (CH4, O2, CO2, SO2, H2O). To demonstrate the efficiency of this approach, one selected dataset with a sol-gel-based catalysts is presented. Compositions are 3 at.% precious metals (Pt, Rh) combined with different amounts of Al, Mn, and Ce in the form of mixed oxides. To find new promising materials for the abatement of methane, about two thousand different compositions were synthesized and ranked using ecIRT, and several hundred were characterized using a plug flow reactor and their ageing behaviour was determined.


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