Mitigation of Combustion Instability and NO_(x)Emissions by Microjets in Lean Premixed Flames with Different Swirl Numbers

Swirl combustion serves as a helpful flame stabilization method,which also affects the combustion and emission characteristics.This article experimentally investigated the effects of CO_(2)microjets on combustion instability and NO_(x)emissions in lean premixed flames with different swirl numbers.The microjets’control feasibility was examined from three variables of CO_(2)jet flow rate,thermal power,and swirl angles.Results indicate that microjets can mitigate the combustion instability and NO_(x)emissions in lean premixed burners with different swirl numbers and thermal power.Still,the damping effect of microjets in low swirl intensity is better than that in high swirl intensity.The damping ratio of pressure amplitude can reach the maximum of 98%,and NO_(x)emissions can realize the maximum reduction of 10.1×10^(−6)at the swirl angle of 30°.Besides,the flame macrostructure switches from an inverted cone shape to a petal shape,and the flame length reduction at low swirl intensity is higher than that of high swirl intensity.This research clarified the control differences of mitigation of combustion instability and NO_(x)emissions by microjets in lean premixed flames with different swirl numbers,contributing to the optimization of microjets control and the construction of high-performance burners.

A novel method for chemistry tabulation of strained premixed/stratified flames based on principal component analysis

The principal component analysis （PCA） is used to analyze the high dimen- sional chemistry data of laminar premixed/stratified flames under strain effects. The first few principal components （PCs） with larger contribution ratios axe chosen as the tabu- lated scalars to build the look-up chemistry table. Prior tests show that strained premixed flame structure can be well reconstructed. To highlight the physical meanings of the tabu- lated scalars in stratified flames, a modified PCA method is developed, where the mixture fraction is used to replace one of the PCs with the highest correlation coefficient. The other two tabulated scalars are then modified with the Schmidt orthogonalization. The modified tabulated scalars not only have clear physical meanings, but also contain passive scalars. The PCA method has good commonality, and can be extended for building the thermo-chemistry table including strain rate effects when different fuels are used.

Experimental Investigation of Flame Structure and Combustion Limit During Premixed Methane/Air Jet Flame and Sidewall Interaction

The effects of inlet gas parameters and sloping sidewall angle on the flame structure and combustion limit with and without sidewall were experimentally investigated.Flame height and impact angle were obtained by chemiluminescence intensity analysis of CH*distribution.First,the combustion characteristics of flame with and without sidewall at different equivalence ratios were explored;then,the influence of Reynolds number and inlet gas temperature on flame structure and combustion limit of v-shaped flame with sidewall were analyzed,and the results with sidewall were compared with those without sidewall.Finally,the variation trend of flame parameters with different sloping sidewall angles was analyzed.The experimental results show that the existence of sidewall makes flame shape change from“M-shaped”to“inverted N-shaped”,and conical shape to trapezoidal shape.The inhibition effect of sidewall on flame stretching downstream is strengthened with the increase in Reynolds number;but as the temperature of the inlet gas increases,the inhibitory effect is obviously weakened.When sloping sidewall angle decreases from 90°to 55°at 5°intervals,flame height and impact angle of v-shaped flame reach the extreme value whenβ=80°.Compared with the case without sidewall,the range of v-shaped flame with sidewall has no obvious trend of broadening or shrinking when inlet gas temperature is increased;however,as sloping sidewall angle decreases,the range of the v-shaped flame shrinks obviously and flammability limit increases significantly.

Inerting characteristics of entrained atomized water on premixed methane-air flame

A combustion tube experiment platform was designed and used to study the inerting conditions and capacity of entrained atomized water on premixed methane–air flame. The structure of a laminar flame of premixed methane–air gas and the process of interaction between atomized water and flame was recorded, and the rules of combustion velocity, stability and strength rate of laminar flame were experimentally studied. The inerting process and mechanism was analyzed, and the characteristics of inerting premixed methane–air gas within explosion limits by atomized water were acquired. The research results show that: for the premixed methane–air gas with a concentration of 7%, the minimum inerting atomized water flux is 20.8 m L/(m2min); for the premixed methane–air gas with a concentration of 9%, the minimum inerting atomized water flux is 32.9 m L/(m2min); for the premixed methane–air gas with a concentration of 11%, the minimum inerting atomized water flux is 44.6 m L/(m2min). The research results are significant for extinguishing methane flame and inhibiting of methane explosion using atomized water.

Experimental Study of Premixed Stoichiometric Ethylene/Oxygen/Argon Flame

A comprehensive experimental study of the premixed ethylene/oxygen/argon flame at 2.667 kPa with a stoichiometric equivalence ratio （Ф=1） was performed with the tunable synchrotron photoionization and molecular-beam sampling mass spectrometry techniques. The isomers of most observed species in the flame were unambiguously identified by measurements of the photoionization etticiency spectra, e.g. C3H4, C2H4O and C4H4. The mole fraction profiles of species up to C7H8 were measured by scanning the burner position at the selected photon energies near ionization thresholds, and the flame temperature profile was obtained by using Pt/Pt-13%Rh thermocouple. Compared with the previous studies, a lot of new flame species： C3H2, C3H3, C3H5, C2H6O, C4H2, C4H4, C4H6, C3H4O, C3H6O, C3H8O, C5H6, C4H8O and C7H8, were observed. A series of free radicals in the flame are detected to be CH3, C2H3, C2H5, HCO, C3H3 and C3H5. Based on the experimental work, a reduced reaction mechanism was developed including 40 species and 223 reactions. Modeling and measurements agree well for the major species and most intermediates. A detailed kinetic model is desired for this flame.

CH_(4)/NO_(x) Reduced Mechanisms Used for Modeling Premixed Combustion

This study has identify useful reduced mechanisms that can be used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the flow field, combustion and emissions of gas turbine engine combustors. Reduced mechanisms lessen computational cost and possess the ability to accurately predict the overall flame structure, including gas temperature and species as CH4, CO and NOx. The S-STEP algorithm which based on computational singular perturbation method (CSP) is performed for reduced the detailed mechanism GRI-3.0. This algorithm required as input: the detailed mechanism, a numerical solution of the problem and the desired number of steps in the reduced mechanism. In this work, we present a 10-Step reduced mechanism obtained through S-STEP algorithm. The rate of each reaction in the reduced mechanism depends on all species, steady-state and non-steady state. The former are calculated from the solution of a system of steady-state algebraic relations with the point relaxation algorithm. Based on premixed code calculations, The numeric results which were obtained for 1 atm ≤ Pressure ≤ 30 atm and 1.4 ≤ ф ≤ 0.6 on the basis of the ten steps global mechanism, were compared with those computed on the basis of the detailed mechanism GRI-3.0. The 10-step reduced mechanism predicts with accuracy the similar results obtained by the full GRI-3.0 mechanism for both NOx and CH4 chemistry.

Analytical Interaction of the Acoustic Wave and Turbulent Flame

A modified resonance model of a weakly turbulent flame in a high-frequency acoustic wave is derived analytically. Under the mechanism of Darrieus-Landau instability, the amplitude of flame wrinkles, which is as functions of the expansion coefficient and the perturbation wave number, increases greatly independent of the stationary＇ turbulence. The high perturbation wave number makes the resonance easier to be triggered but weakened with respect to the extra acoustic wave. In a closed burning chamber with the acoustic wave induced by the flame itself, the high perturbation wave number is to restrain the resonance for a realistic flame.

On the Necessary Grid Resolution for Verified Calculation of Premixed Laminar Flames

We consider the grid resolution necessary to resolve combustion in a mixture of calorically imperfect ideal gases described by detailed kinetics and multicomponent transport.Using the steady premixed laminar flame as a paradigm,the required spatial discretization to capture all detailed physics in the reaction zone is found via 1)determination of the finest grid used in a standard software tool which employs adaptive mesh refinement,2)examination of peak values of intermediate species mass fractions in the flame zone as a function of grid size,3)a formal grid resolution study,and 4)a robust new eigenvalue analysis developed to estimate the finest length scale.Application to laminar premixed flames in hydrogen-air flames reveals that the finest length scale is on the order of 10^(−4) cm for combustion at atmospheric pressure.Resolution at this scale is shown to be necessary to capture detailed species mass fraction profiles;other features such as steady flame speeds and equilibrium thermochemical properties do not have such a stringent length scale requirement.

Effect of Thermal Radiation Heat Transfer on the Temperature Measurement by the Thermocouple in Premixed Laminar Flames

In the past 30 years,the effect of thermal radiation and convection heat transfer,which are predominant at high temperature and can affect the measurement accuracy of thermocouple,were not fully considered in the field of laminar flame researches.In this work,the effect of thermal radiation heat transfer was newly calculated by determining the spectral irradiation heat flux from the whole space to thermocouple and the radiation heat loss from thermocouple junction to surroundings.Analysis reveals that the thermocouple itself maintains at high temperature,resulting serious thermal radiation heat loss,which can be compensated via receiving energy from convection-transferred heat as well as thermal radiation emitted by flame and burner surface.Such method was applied to correct the temperatures measured by thermocouple in rich nitromethane flame as reference.The results indicate that the radiation heat loss plays a dominant role,while the radiations emitted by flame and burner surface account for minor contribution with the percentage of 20.78%at the height above burner(HAB)of 0.4 mm,3.63%at HAB of 2.0 mm and even smaller at higher HAB.Temperature correction states that the maximum temperature error is 117.60 K,where the effect of thermal radiation emitted by flame and burner surface is less than 1.75 K.Consequently,it is provably reasonable and feasible to concentrate on the radiation heat loss and ignore the effect of thermal radiation emitted by flame and burner in real combustion processes.

Quantitative measurements of one-dimensional OH absolute concentration profiles in a methane/air flat flame by bi-directional laser-induced fluorescence

The one-dimensional （1D） spatial distributions of OH absolute concentration in methane/air laminar premixed flat flame under different equivalence ratios at atmospheric pressure are investigated by using bi-directional laser-induced flu- orescence （LIF） detection scheme combined with the direct absorption spectroscopy. The effective peak absorption cross section and the average temperature at a height of 2 mm above the burner are obtained by exciting absorption on the Q1（8） rotational line in the A2∑＋ （Dt = 0） ←- X2∏ （v = 0） at 309.240 nm. The measured values are 1.86×10-15 cm2 and 1719 K, respectively. Spatial filtering and frequency filtering methods of reducing noise are used to deal with the experi- mental data, and the smoothing effects are also compared using the two methods. The spatial distribution regularities of OH concentration are obtained with the equivalence ratios ranging from 0.8 to 1.3. The spatial resolution of the measured result is 84μm. Finally, a comparison is made between the experimental result of this paper and other relevant study results.

The Effect of Swirl Intensity on the Flow Behavior and Combustion Characteristics of a Lean Propane-Air Flame

The effect of swirl number(Sn)on the flow behavior and combustion characteristics of a lean premixed propane FlameФ=0.5 in a swirl burner configuration was numerically verified in this study.Two-dimensional numerical simulations were performed using ANSYS-Fluent software.For turbulence closure,a standard K-εturbulence model was applied.The turbulence-chemistry interaction scheme was modeled using the Finite Rate-Eddy Dissipation hybrid model(FR/EDM)with a reduced three-step reaction mechanism.The P1 radiation model was used for the flame radiation inside the combustion chamber.Four different swirl numbers were selected(0,0.72,1.05,and 1.4)corresponding to different angles(0°,39°,50°,and 57.8°).The results show that the predicted model agrees very well with the experimental data,especially with respect to the axial and radial velocity and temperature profiles.An outer recirculation zone(ORZ)is present in the combustor corner at Sn=0 and an inner recirculation zone(IRZ)appears at the combustor centerline inlet at a critical Sn=0.72.When the Sn reaches an excessive value,the IRZ moves toward the premixing tube,leading to a flame flashback.The flame structure and its length are strongly affected by changes in the Sn as well as the formation of NOx and CO at the combustor exit.

Study on Dynamical Behavior of Turbulent Premixed V-flames

Differential interference contrast method was applied to investigate the flickering characteristics of V-flame in terms of both temporal and spatial scales. The flow characteristics of incident premixed combustibles were measured by means of laser Doppler anemometry (LDA). The characteristics of wake flow behind the stabilizing rod were obtained with numerical simulation. While the integral temporal scale of incident turbulence is about 1ms, the integral spatial scale about 2 mm, the characteristic flickering time scale is about 83 ms and spatial scale about 10 mm. The flame flickering frequency is more than 12 Hz, does not comply with the wake vortex shedding frequency, which is about 110 Hz. It is well-known that the flickering of V-flame is affected by both the incident turbulence and the wake flow after the stabilizing rod, but the result of the paper shows that the relationship between flickering characteristics and flow characteristics is much more complicated by the chemical reaction.

Temporally resolving premixed turbulent flame structures using self-supervised adversarial reconstruction of CH-PLIF

Understanding the turbulence-flame interaction is crucial to model the low-emission combustors developed for energy and propulsion applications. To this end, a novel frame interpolation (FI) method is proposed to better resolve the spatiotemporal evolution of premixed turbulent flame structures. The framework is completely selfsupervised, agnostic to optical flow, and driven by leveraging transferrable feature knowledge at lower speeds and adversarial learning to statistically map the flame dynamics across frames. The method is successfully applied on a 10 kHz CH planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) dataset of highly wrinkled premixed flames with turbulent Reynolds numbers (ReT ) of 1100, 1400, and 7900, by down-sampling the image sequence to 5 kHz and restoring the sequence back to 10 kHz via FI. All reconstructions recovered important flame events and displayed excellent resemblance of the corrugated CH-layer geometries to that of the ground truths, with average intersection over union (IoU) and structural similarity index (SSIM) scores of 0.49 and 0.82, which are above the high-similarity baselines of 0.36 and 0.75, respectively. The wrinkling parameters (WP) of the flames also matched the ground truths, wherein R2 was roughly 0.95 for ReT = 1100 and 1400 and 0.85 for ReT = 7900 (lower due to the turbulence-induced uncertainties). The FI is further iteratively repeated to 40 kHz on the ReT = 7900 flames to facilitate pocket analysis by confidently linking their origin of formation, thus, enabling distinction from 3D tunnels, and improving statistical characterization of their consumption speeds. Given that the object features do not exhibit highly turbulent motions with regard to the initial time step, the proposed FI method is shown to be highly accurate and useful to analyzing finite-resolution experimental image sets including, but not restricted to, CH-PLIF.

Effects of Flame Temperature and Absorption Coefficient on Premixed Flame Interactions with Radiation

The effects of the flame temperature and the absorption coefficient on interactions between radiative heat transfer and the flame behavior were numerically investigated using high-fidelity numerical code with the discrete ordinates method.To study the effects of the flame temperature and the absorption coefficient,three different flame temperatures and four different absorption coefficient conditions were selected,so twelve test cases were studied in total.In the numerical test results,radiation effects resulted in preheating of the reactant gases and heat loss from the product gases.A higher flame temperature resulted in stronger preheating effects in reactants near the flame.Due to the preheating effects,with the appropriate absorption coefficient,the peak temperature appeared at the flame front.Lower flame temperatures resulted in larger reabsorption effects in the product zone.The peak temperature at the flame front and the flame speed were influenced by the combined effects of preheating and radiative heat loss at the flame front.Depending on the conditions,due to those effects,the peak temperature and the flame speed could increase or decrease.When the absorption coefficient was sufficiently large,the temperature decrease was reduced in the product zone.

H2/CO/air premixed and partially premixed flame structure at different pressures based on reaction limit analysis

Premixed and partially premixed flames (PPFs) of H2/CO/air syngas are studied numerically to investigate the effect of pressure on syngas PPF structure. Chemical characteristics of the syngas flame at different pressures are investigated based on reaction limit analysis using a one-dimensional configuration. The results show that CO affects the syngas reaction limits through both physical effects that consist mainly in dilution and chemical effects that are related to both R23 (CO+OH=CO2+H) and HCO pathway. In particular, the HCO pathway weakens the flame at low pressures due to the chain-terminating effect of R25 (HCO+O2=CO+HO2) and R26 (HCO+H=CO+H2), and enhances the flame at high pressures because of the contribution of R25 to the HO2chain-branching process. These CO chemical characteristics are also observed in the premixed zone of 50%H2+50%CO syngas PPFs whereas only R23 is important in the non-premixed zone.

Investigation of the Laminar Premixed n-Propylamine Flame

The laminar premixed n-propylamine(NPA)flame with equivalence ratio of 1.70 has been investigated at 4666.28 Pa using tunable synchrotron photoionization and molecular-beam mass spectrometry techniques.Chemical structures and mole fractions of 40 species were determined.Ethenol,allylamine,butadiyne,vinylacetylene,1,3-butadiene,1-butene,2-butene,n-butyl radical,1,3-cyclopentadiene,cyclopentene,2-pentene,benzene,toluene,ethylbenzene,2-propen-1-imine,cyclopropanimine,pyrrole,2-butenenitrile and n-butylamine were newly identified in the amine flames.Mole fraction profiles of some species including reactants,intermediates and products in the NPA flame were given.HCN and N_(2)were observed as the primary N-containing products in the NPA flame,which was different from the result that NO was the major N-containing products in previous studies of nitrogen flames.The bond energies of NPA were calculated through quantum chemistry calculations on the basis of density functional theory at the CBS-QB3 level.It showed that the CH_(3)CH_(2)-CH_(2)NH_(2)bond was the weakest and NPA mainly decomposed to CH_(2)NH_(2)and C_(2)H_(5)radicals.The H-abstractions at C_(α)by OH/O(NPA+OH=CH_(3)CH_(2)CHNH_(2)+H_(2)O and NPA+O=CH_(3)CH_(2)CHNH_(2)+OH)had significant promoting effects on NPA consumption.The N conversion chain of NPA under flame conditions was proposed and detailed analysis with respect to intermediates especially the nitrogen-containing species were provided.The results will enrich the understanding of NPA flame and are essential to further establish the kinetic mechanism.

Modeling of the turbulent burning velocity for planar and Bunsen flames over a wide range of conditions

We develop and assess a model of the turbulent burning velocity ST over a wide range of conditions.The aim is to obtain an explicit ST model for turbulent combustion modeling and flame analysis.The model consists of sub models of the stretch factor and the turbulent flame area.The stretch factor characterizes the flame response of turbulence stretch and incorporates detailed chemistry and transport effects with a lookup table of laminar counterflow flames.The flame area model captures the area growth based on Lagrangian statistics of propagating surfaces and considers the effects of turbulence length scales and fuel characteristics.The present model predicts sT via an algebraic expression without free parameters.We assess the model using 490 cases of the direct numerical simulation or experiment reported from various research groups on planar and Bunsen flames over a wide range of conditions,covering fuels from hydrogen to n-dodecane,pressures from 1 to 30 atm,lean and rich mixtures,turbulence intensity ratios from 0.1 to 177.6,and turbulence length ratios from 0.5 to 66.7.Despite the scattering sT data in the literature,the comprehensive comparison shows that the proposed ST model has an overall good agreement over the wide range of conditions,with the averaged modeling error of 28.1%.

Numerical Study on the Morphology of a Re-Ignited Laminar Partially Premixed Flame with a Co-Axial Pilot Flame

Re-ignited partially premixed flame(PPF)is a quite extensive flame type in real applications,which is directly relevant to the local and global extinction and re-ignition phenomenon.The authors designed a model burner to establish laminar re-ignited PPFs.Numerical simulations were carried out to reveal the morphology of laminar re-ignited PPF.Based on the distributions of temperature,heat release and radicals,the morphologies of re-ignited flames were explored.W-shaped flames were formed under pilot-lean conditions.Line-shaped and y-shaped flames were formed under pilot-rich conditions.Both w-shaped and y-shaped flames had a triple-flame structure.The re-ignited flames can stand beyond the rich flammability limit.Additionally,OH distributions indicated both pilot flame and re-ignited flame well as it rapidly increased near the flame front.OH concentration did not increase visibly while CH2O concentration mildly increased during the mild re-ignition process in the pre-zone of the re-ignited PPF.According to the results of 0-D simulations using closed homogeneous reactor,both OH and CH2O reduced ignition time significantly.The results of this work are helpful for understanding re-ignited PPF more closely.

Theoretical analysis of the conical premixed flame response to upstream velocity disturbances considering flame speed development effects

The effect of upstream velocity pertuibations on the response of a premixed flame was investigated in terms of the flame transfer function dependency on excitation frequency.In this study,the assumption of constant flame speed was extended and the effect of flame speed development was considered;i.e.,the flame speed would grow with the time after ignition or with the distance from a flame-holder.In the present study,the kinematics of a conical flame was investigated by linearization of the front tracking equation of flame to uniform and convected fluctuations of the flow velocity and the response was compared with that of a V-shaped flame and the experimental data in the previous studies.The results show that the effect of flame speed development could influence a decreasing gain and increase the phase of the flame response to the uniform velocity oscillations in low and moderate frequencies.Comparing the variations in the gain of flame response upon normalized frequency,show that a conical flame has lower values than the V-flame.In other woods,these flames might be less susceptible to combustion instabilities than the V-flames.Furthennore,the variations in phase of the V-flames responses,which show a quasi-linear behavior with normalized frequency,have higher values than the saturated behavior in phase of the conical flame responses.Also,considering that the flame speed development induces an increase in the gain and phase of the conical flame response to the convected velocity oscillations in certain frequencies;because the developed flame front has longer length in comparison to the flame front in constant flame speed model.Therefore,the flame length may be longer than convective wavelength and the heat release would be generated in different points of the flame;consequently the flow oscillations might exert a stronger impact on the unsteady heat release fluctuations.

Effects of Lewis and Karlovitz numbers on transport equations for turbulent kinetic energy and enstrophy

A three-dimensional Direct numerical simulation(DNS)with complex chemistry was employed to examine the statistical behavior of turbulent kinetic energy(TKE)and enstrophy transport equations in hydrogen(Lewis number(Le)≈0.4)and dodecane(Le≈4.2)flames.The Karlovitz(Ka)numbers ranged from 4 to 150,involving both the thin and broken reaction zones.Budget analyses of TKE and enstrophy transport equations are performed,and scaling terms in the literature are re-examined.Similar to thin reaction zone flames,viscous dissipation term appears to be the most important term in the TKE balance,while viscous dissipation and vortex-stretching terms are the dominant terms in the enstrophy transport equation at high Ka number.The velocity-pressure gradient and the mean velocity dilatation in the TKE transport equation and the dilatation term in enstrophy budget are found to be affected by the Le.Modified scaling estimations for those terms affected by Le are proposed in this work to account for the Le effects spanning different combustion regimes.This work confirmed that Kolmogorov’s first hypothesis is not valid for low Ka number flames investigated in this study,where the vortex stretching and viscous dissipation terms cannot be scaled with local dissipation and viscosity.At sufficiently high Ka number flames,the vorticity can be scaled with the Kolmogorov time scale,and the mean enstrophy value approaches homogeneous,isotropic,non-reacting turbulence flow,but lower Le fuels require much higher Ka number to achieve that.