scholarly journals Evaluation of Chemical Kinetic Mechanisms for Methane Combustion: A Review from a CFD Perspective

Fuels ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-240
Author(s):  
Niklas Zettervall ◽  
Christer Fureby ◽  
Elna J. K. Nilsson

Methane is an important fuel for gas turbine and gas engine combustion, and the most common fuel in fundamental combustion studies. As Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling of combustion becomes increasingly important, so do chemical kinetic mechanisms for methane combustion. Kinetic mechanisms of different complexity exist, and the aim of this study is to review commonly used detailed, reduced, and global mechanisms of importance for CFD of methane combustion. In this review, procedures of relevance to model development are outlined. Simulations of zero and one-dimensional configurations have been performed over a wide range of conditions, including addition of H2, CO2 and H2O, and the results are used in a final recommendation about the use of the different mechanisms. The aim of this review is to put focus on the importance of an informed choice of kinetic mechanism to obtain accurate results at a reasonable computational cost. It is shown that for flame simulations, a reduced mechanism with only 42 irreversible reactions gives excellent agreement with experimental data, using only 5% of the computational time as compared to the widely used GRI-Mech 3.0. The reduced mechanisms are highly suitable for flame simulations, while for ignition they tend to react too slow, giving longer than expected ignition delay time. For combustible mixtures with addition of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, or water, the detailed as well as reduced mechanisms generally show as good performance as for the corresponding simulations of pure methane/air mixtures.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Ramirez Hernandez ◽  
Trupti Kathrotia ◽  
Torsten Methling ◽  
Marina Braun-Unkhoff ◽  
Uwe Riedel

Abstract The development of advanced reaction models to predict pollutant emissions in aero-engine combustors usually relies on surrogate formulations of a specific jet fuel for mimicking its chemical composition. 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene is one of the suitable components to represent aromatics species in those surrogates. However, a comprehensive reaction model for 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene combustion requires a mechanism to describe the m-xylene oxidation. In this work, the development of a chemical kinetic mechanism for describing the m-xylene combustion in a wide parameter range (i.e. temperature, pressure, and fuel equivalence ratios) is presented. The m-xylene reaction submodel was developed based on existing reaction mechanisms of similar species such as toluene and reaction pathways adapted from literature. The sub-model was integrated into an existing detailed mechanism that contains the kinetics of a wide range of n-paraffins, iso-paraffins, cyclo-paraffins, and aromatics. Simulation results for m-xylene were validated against experimental data available in literature. Results show that the presented m-xylene mechanism correctly predicts ignition delay times at different pressures and temperatures as well as laminar burning velocities at atmospheric pressure and various fuel equivalence ratios. At high pressure, some deviations of the calculated laminar burning velocity and the measured values are obtained at stoichiometric to rich equivalence ratios. Additionally, the model predicts reasonably well concentration profiles of major and intermediate species at different temperatures and atmospheric pressure.


Author(s):  
Michael V. Johnson ◽  
S. Scott Goldsborough ◽  
Timothy A. Smith ◽  
Steven S. McConnell

Continued interest in kinetically-modulated combustion regimes, such as HCCI and PCCI, poses a significant challenge in controlling the ignition timing due to the lack of direct control of combustion phasing hardware available in traditional SI and CI engines. Chemical kinetic mechanisms, validated based on fundamental data from experiments like rapid compression machines and shock tubes, offer reasonably accurate predictions of ignition timing; however utilizing these requires high computational cost making them impractical for use in engine control schemes. Empirically-derived correlations offer faster control, but are generally not valid beyond the narrow range of conditions over which they were derived. This study discusses initial work in the development of an ignition correlation based on a detailed chemical kinetic mechanism for three component gasoline surrogate, composed of n-heptane, iso-octane and toluene, or toluene reference fuel (TRF). Simulations are conducted over a wide range of conditions including temperature, pressure, equivalence ratio and dilution for a range of tri-component blends in order to produce ignition delay time and investigate trends in ignition as pressure, equivalence ratio, temperature and fuel reactivity are varied. A modified, Arrhenius-based power law formulation will be used in a future study to fit the computed ignition delay times.


Author(s):  
Astrid Yuliana Ramirez Hernandez ◽  
Trupti Kathrotia ◽  
Torsten Methling ◽  
Marina Braun-Unkhoff ◽  
Uwe Riedel

Abstract The development of advanced reaction models to predict pollutant emissions in aero-engine combustors usually relies on surrogate formulations of a specific jet fuel for mimicking its chemical composition. 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene is one of the suitable components to represent aromatics species in those surrogates. However, a comprehensive reaction model for 1,3,5-trimethylbenzene combustion requires a mechanism to describe the m-xylene oxidation. In this work, the development of a chemical kinetic mechanism for describing the m-xylene combustion in a wide parameter range (i.e. temperature, pressure, and fuel equivalence ratios) is presented. The m-xylene reaction sub-model was developed based on existing reaction mechanisms of similar species such as toluene and reaction pathways adapted from literature. The sub-model was integrated into an existing detailed mechanism that contains the kinetics of a wide range of n-paraffins, iso-paraffins, cyclo-paraffins, and aromatics. Simulation results for m-xylene were validated against experimental data available in literature. Results show that the presented m-xylene mechanism correctly predicts ignition delay times at different pressures and temperatures as well as laminar burning velocities at atmospheric pressure and various fuel equivalence ratios. At high pressure, some deviations of the calculated laminar burning velocity and the measured values are obtained at stoichiometric to rich equivalence ratios. Additionally, the model predicts reasonably well concentration profiles of major and intermediate species at different temperatures and atmospheric pressure.


2018 ◽  
Vol 141 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guangying Yu ◽  
Hameed Metghalchi ◽  
Omid Askari ◽  
Ziyu Wang

The rate-controlled constrained-equilibrium (RCCE), a model order reduction method, has been further developed to simulate the combustion of propane/oxygen mixture diluted with nitrogen or argon. The RCCE method assumes that the nonequilibrium states of a system can be described by a sequence of constrained-equilibrium states subject to a small number of constraints. The developed new RCCE approach is applied to the oxidation of propane in a constant volume, constant internal energy system over a wide range of initial temperatures and pressures. The USC-Mech II (109 species and 781 reactions, without nitrogen chemistry) is chosen as chemical kinetic mechanism for propane oxidation for both detailed kinetic model (DKM) and RCCE method. The derivation for constraints of propane/oxygen mixture starts from the eight universal constraints for carbon-fuel oxidation. The universal constraints are the elements (C, H, O), number of moles, free valence, free oxygen, fuel, and fuel radicals. The full set of constraints contains eight universal constraints and seven additional constraints. The results of RCCE method are compared with the results of DKM to verify the effectiveness of constraints and the efficiency of RCCE. The RCCE results show good agreement with DKM results under different initial temperature and pressures, and RCCE also reduces at least 60% CPU time. Further validation is made by comparing the experimental data; RCCE shows good agreement with shock tube experimental data.


Author(s):  
Chitralkumar V. Naik ◽  
Karthik V. Puduppakkam ◽  
Abhijit Modak ◽  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Ellen Meeks

Validated surrogate models have been developed for two Fisher-Tropsch (F-T) fuels. The models started with a systematic approach to determine an appropriate surrogate fuel composition specifically tailored for the two alternative jet-fuel samples. A detailed chemical kinetic mechanism has been assembled for these model surrogates starting from literature sources, and then improved to ensure self-consistency of the kinetics and thermodynamic data. This mechanism has been tested against fundamental laboratory data on auto-ignition times, laminar flame-speeds, extinction strain rates, and NOx emissions. Literature data used to validate the mechanism include both the individual surrogate-fuel components and actual F-T fuel samples where available. As part of the validation, simulations were performed for a wide variety of experimental configurations, as well as a wide range of temperatures and equivalence ratios for fuel/air mixtures. Comparison of predicted surrogate-fuel behavior against data on real F-T fuel behavior also show the effectiveness of the surrogate-matching approach and the accuracy of the detailed-kinetics mechanisms. The resulting validated mechanism has been also reduced through application of automated mechanism reduction techniques to provide progressively smaller mechanisms, with different degrees of accuracy, that are reasonable for use in CFD simulations employing detailed kinetics.


Author(s):  
Owen M. Pryor ◽  
Erik Ninnemann ◽  
Subith Vasu

Abstract Carbon monoxide time-histories and ignition delay times were measured in carbon dioxide diluted methane mixtures behind reflected shockwaves. Experiments were performed around 2 atm for a temperature range between 1650–2000 K. The experiments were performed for a mixture of XCH4 = 0.5%, XO2 = 1.0%, XCO2 = 8.5%, XAr = 90.0%. The mixture was chosen to minimize energy release during the experiment and a minimum of 2 ms was recorded for all experiments. The carbon monoxide time-histories were measured using a tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy technique and measuring the absorbance at two different wavelengths to isolate the impact of carbon monoxide on the absorbance. Carbon monoxide was measured at a wavelength of 4886.94 nm while the interfering species was measured at 4891.17 nm. Each experiment was performed twice, with the pressure and temperature before combustion being matched to within the experimental uncertainty of the two experiments. The ignition delay times were measured using OH* radical emission to determine the time-scales of the experiments. All experiments were compared to detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms that can be found in the literature. The experimental results show that the detailed mechanisms from the literature were able to accurately predict the general profile of the carbon monoxide time-histories but under-predicted maximum concentration of CO being formed at these conditions.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shrabanti Roy ◽  
Omid Askari

Abstract Reducing the size of a detail chemical kinetic is necessary in the prospect of numerical computation. In this work a skeleton reduction is done on a detail mechanism of ethanol. The detailed ethanol mechanism used here is developed through reaction mechanism generator (RMG). The generated mechanism is validated at wide range of engine relevant operating conditions using laminar burning speed (LBS), ignition delay time (IDT) and species mole fraction calculation at different reactor conditions. This detail mechanism consists of 67 species and 1031 reactions. Though the mechanism is in a very good agreement at various operating ranges with experimental data, it is costly to use a detail mechanism for 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. To make the mechanism applicable for CFD simulation further reduction of species and reactions is essential. In this work a skeleton mechanism is generated using directed relation graph technique with error propagation and sensitivity analysis (DRGEPSA). The DRGEPSA method, works based on error calculation at user defined condition. This technique is a combination of two methods, directed relation graph with error propagation (DRGEP) and directed relation graph with sensitivity analysis (DRGASA). To ensure the wide range of applicability of the skeleton mechanism, IDT is calculated at temperature, pressure, and equivalence ratio ranges from 700–2000 K, 1–40 atm and 0.6–1.4 respectively. A 10% error estimation is considered during the process. Initially DRGEP is applied on the detail mechanism to eliminate unimportant species. Further, sensitivity analysis helps to identify and reduce more unimportant species from the mechanism. Reactions related to the deleted species are automatically removed from the mechanism in each step. The final skeleton mechanism has 42 species and 464 reactions. This skeleton mechanism is validated and compared with different IDT data for the conditions not used in reduction technique. Results of LBS and different species concentration from reactor conditions is considered for validation. The skeleton mechanism can reduce computational time by 35% for LBS and 25% for IDT calculation. For future work, this skeleton mechanism will be considered in optimum reduction process.


Author(s):  
Daniel DeMore ◽  
William Maier

The present paper describes the development of a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) modeling approach suitable for the analysis, design, and optimization of rotating centrifugal separator stage geometries. The Homogeneous Multiple Size Group (MUSIG) model implemented in the commercial code CFX V13.0 was utilized as a basis for the CFD modeling method. The model was developed through a series of studies to understand the impact of droplet size distribution, particle coalescence, rotor/stator interface treatment, and mesh resolution on the prediction of separation efficiency for a given rotating separator geometry. This model was then validated against the OEM’s extensive in-house experimental separation testing database. The resulting CFD modeling method is shown to adequately reproduce observed trends in separation performance over a wide range of operating conditions.


Author(s):  
Tao Yang ◽  
Ran Yi ◽  
Qiaoling Wang ◽  
Chien-Pin Chen

Kerosene and diesel fuels involved in spray combustion operations are complex fuels composed of a wide and diverse variety of hydrocarbon components. For practical numerical modeling of the evaporation and combustion phenomena in a combustor, well-designed surrogates fuels that can mimic the real fuel thermal and chemical properties can be utilized. In this study, predictions and validations of the influence of fuel on the liquid and vapor penetration characteristics within a constant-volume chamber were first performed utilizing a benchmark m-xylene/ n-dodecane, Jet-A, and diesel surrogate fuels. Then, simulations of reacting spray of a bi-component m-xylene/ n-dodecane fule, and a four-component Jet-A surrogate fuel ( n-dodecane (C12H26), iso-cetane (C16H34), trans-decalin (C10H18) and toluene (C7H8)) were studied aided by skeleton chemical kinetic mechanisms available from the literature. The results of ignition delay time, lift-off length, radicals, and the mass fraction histories of fuel species were comprehensively used to assess the performance of relevant thermophysical and chemical sub-models. Two different chemical mechanisms were compared in detail to investigate the effect of the chemical kinetics model on the flame structures and spray characteristics. It has been found that the spray ignition of multi-component fuels is remarkably influenced by the chosen chemical kinetic mechanism and less affected by the droplet evaporation models.


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