Experimental and detailed kinetic modeling study of the effect of strain rate on laminar counterflow flames of Jet-A surrogate fuel

Kuti, OA ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4836-8050 (2024) Experimental and detailed kinetic modeling study of the effect of strain rate on laminar counterflow flames of Jet-A surrogate fuel. In: Advances in Computational Heat Transfer, CHT-24, 26 May 2024 - 30 May 2024, Istanbul, Turkey.

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Abstract

This study elucidated the combustion processes of Jet-A surrogate fuel using a counterflow burner system at strain rates of 53 and 80 s-1 respectively. The gas chromatography (GC) spectroscopic technique was used to measure O2, H2, and C1-C4 hydrocarbon species. 0-D Chemical kinetic simulations were performed to complement the experiment and to determine key reactions leading to the formation of major combustion species. It was observed that an increase in the strain rate led to the formation of a stretched flame with thinner structures. Furthermore, as the flow velocity increased, the stagnation plane (i.e., location of zero flow velocity) and flame structure moved further upward towards the oxidizer location at the 80 s-1 strain rate. As a result of shorter residence time (reciprocal of strain rate), the heat release rate of the SR80 (flame at 80 s-1 strain rate) flame was lower than that of SR53 (flame at 53 s-1 strain rate). The simulated mole fractions of species agreed with the experiment. The SR80 flame produced less quantities of species due to the shorter residence time scale. In the SR53 and SR80 flames, different reaction routes were observed in the formation of combustion species while similar reaction routes were observed specifically for the C2H6, C3H8, C4H6, and CO2 species. The saturated hydrocarbon compounds of the fuel components were found to play a vital role in the formation of some pyrolyzed products while the aromatic hydrocarbon compounds contributed to the formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The role of HCO species as a marker for heat release was investigated. It was observed that the heat-release rate peak is linked to high exothermic reactions which led to the consumption of CO and H2 to produce CO2 and H2O species respectively.