Laminar burning velocity, emissions, and flame structure of dimethyl ether-hydrogen air mixtures

Abstract

The present work reports experimentation and numerical simulations of laminar burning velocity, emission analysis, and flame structure of dimethyl ether-hydrogen mixtures. The volumetric hydrogen addition is considered into the DME fuel for a range of mixture equivalence ratios (0.6<ϕ < 1.7). The initial mixture temperature is raised to 373 K at constant atmospheric pressure of 1.0 bar. The heat flux method is utilized to investigate the laminar burning velocity in laminar premixed planar adiabatic flames. The laminar burning velocity (LBV), along with the flame position and emission measurements, are extracted from these flames. The computations were performed with freely propagating flames (LBV, species, sensitivity, etc. data), and the burner stabilizes flames (flame position and emission analysis) for the same mixture and initial conditions using various detailed mechanisms. An emphasis is paid to a newly developed Shrestha mechanism, which includes a radiation model and NO sub-mechanism. Both experimental data and competition results were validated against the pure DME air mixture data available in the existing literature, and further analysis was carried out. It is observed that planar flames can be stabilized only up to a hydrogen addition of 40%. Adding hydrogen enhanced the flame temperature, heat release rates, and burning velocity while reducing the CO and NO emissions. A slight shift of peak burning velocity on the rich side of the equivalence ratio (from 1.05 to 1.2) is observed with hydrogen addition (0–40%). The mixture temperature also enhances the flame temperature and laminar burning velocity. It is interesting to note that hydrogen-added mixtures show a relatively lower dependency on initial mixture temperature. The variation of dominant species and heat release rates are also discussed in detail. The sensitivity analysis is carried out to get information on dominant reactions participating in the combustion of DME hydrogen mixtures.