Investigation of the Effect of Hydrogen and Methane on Combustion of Multicomponent Syngas Mixtures using a Constructed Reduced Chemical Kinetics Mechanism

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of H2 and CH4 concentrations on the ignition delay time and laminar flame speed during the combustion of CH4/H2 and multicomponent syngas mixtures using a novel constructed reduced syngas chemical kinetics mechanism. The results were compared with experiments and GRI Mech 3.0 mechanism. It was found that mixture reactivity decreases and increases when higher concentrations of CH4 and H2 were used, respectively. With higher H2 concentration in the mixture, the formation of OH is faster, leading to higher laminar flame speed and shorter ignition delay time. CH4 and H2 concentrations were calculated at different pressures and equivalence ratios, showing that at high pressures CH4 is consumed slower, and, at different equivalence ratios CH4 reacts at different temperatures. In the presence of H2, CH4 was consumed faster. In the conducted two-stage sensitivity analysis, the first analysis showed that H2/CH4/CO mixture combustion is driven by H2-based reactions related to the consumption/formation of OH and CH4 recombination reactions are responsible for CH4 oxidation. The second analysis showed that similar CH4-based and H2 -based reactions were sensitive in both, methane- and hydrogen-rich H2/CH4 mixtures. The difference was observed for reactions CH2O + OH = HCO + H2O and CH4 + HO2 = CH3 + H2O2, which were found to be important for CH4-rich mixtures, while reactions OH + HO2 = H2O + O2 and HO2 + H = OH + OH were found to be important for H2-rich mixtures.