Combustion

Project -1 : Natural Gas (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) Combustion using OpenFOAM

This project was undertaken as part of a Summer Internship at Udvavisk Technologies Pvt. Ltd. between May - July 2017. The objective of this project was to study NOx and CO emissions that result when LPG gas (which was assumed to be a mixture of Butane, Propane and Methane in various proportions) is burnt in a domestic gas stove. The research paper which was used as a reference when performing this study can be found here. In this work, the rhoReactingBuoyantFoam solver was used (to take Buoyancy effects into account) Standard k-Epsilon model was used to model turbulence and CHEMKIN reaction mechanisms were used to model chemistry.

As a starting point, pure methane combustion was simulated using a single reaction. The temperature, CO2 distribution as well as the velocity vectors are shown below -

        CO2 distribution in Methane single-step Combustion

Temperature distribution in Methane single-step Combustion

         Velocity vectors in Methane single-step Combustion

Following this, new simulations were carried out considering Natural Gas to be a mixture of Propane, Butane and Methane in different ratios. CHEMKIN reaction mechanisms were used to model the chemistry, namely, Jones-Linstedt mechanism for Methane Combustion, Zeldovich mechanism for Nitrogen Chemistry (To estimate NOx), and two-step reaction mechanisms (accounting for CO formation) were used for Propane and Butane chemistry. A total of around 22 reactions were used, and this made the computations expensive. Because of this reason, even though results were obtained, they have not been included as the simulation needs to be run for longer duration.