Hydrogen combustion as a thermal source

Abstract

Hydrogen (H2) has been considered as a sustainable alternative carbon-free fuel. The applications of H2 in various energy devices, such as fuel cell, internal combustion engine, have drawn many interests. However, the application of H2 on industrial burner for thermal supply has not widely applied. Therefore, to develop a H2 designated burner for thermal supply during industrial process, the combustion and heat release characteristics of H2/air diffusion flame on a micro-jet burner was experimentally and numerically investigated. The detail reaction mechanisms with P1 radiation model were applied in this study. The transport and thermal properties of all species were calculated by GRI 3.0 database. The heat release rates of all elementary reaction were programed and calculated. The OH distributions of H2/air diffusion flame on a 3×3 micro-jet burner at various input powers and equivalence ratios were captured by experiments. The total input power was varied from 0.1 kW to 1 kW, the equivalence ratios were changed from 0.5 to 0.95. The results show that the calculated results based on selected reduced mechanism agree well with the experiment results at all calculation conditions. The flame structure can be adjusted by input power and equivalence ratio. A uniform hemisphere flame with high heat release rate can be obtained, which benefits to the application of H2 as a thermal source in future industrial process.