Analysis of steady and oscillating flames fueled by biomass particles and syngases considering two-step pyrolysis and heterogeneous and homogeneous reactions

Abstract

Under unprecedented environmental crisis associated with greenhouse gas emission, biomass has attracted a great deal of attention due to renewable and carbon neutral nature. In this study, the premixed combustion of various types of wood and its derived syngases are examined for steady and oscillating sates. For this purpose, the poplar, birch, beech and pin sawdust woods and syngases composing of H2, CH4 and CO are considered. To model dust cloud combustion, a novel and comprehensive flame structure consisting of drying, two-step pyrolysis and homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions is proposed. Afterward, the governing equations and their appropriate boundary conditions are derived and solved analytically-numerically. The oscillating combustion is also modeled by exerting an external perturbation on the velocity field. The results indicate that due to the occurrence of heterogeneous reactions in wood combustion, the flame propagation velocity of wood is higher than that of syngases which contributes to high oscillations amplitude of syngases. When the mixture initial temperature changes between 300 and 550 K, the flame velocities of woods and syngases vary in the ranges of 0.4–0.7 m/s and 0.1–0.27 m/s, respectively. The maximum amplitude of temperature oscillation of syngases is approximately 8 times more than that of woods.