MILD combustion for hydrogen and syngas at elevated pressures

Abstract

As gas recirculation constitutes a fundamental condition for the realization of MILD combustion, it is necessary to determine gas recirculation ratio before designing MILD combustor. MILD combustion model with gas recirculation was used in this simulation work to evaluate the effect of fuel type and pressure on threshold gas recirculation ratio of MILD mode. Ignition delay time is also an important design parameter for gas turbine combustor, this parameter is kinetically studied to analyze the effect of pressure on MILD mixture ignition. Threshold gas recirculation ratio of hydrogen MILD combustion changes slightly and is nearly equal to that of 10 MJ/Nm3 syngas in the pressure range of 1–19 atm, under the conditions of 298 K fresh reactant temperature and 1373 K exhaust gas temperature, indicating that MILD regime is fuel flexible. Ignition delay calculation results show that pressure has a negative effect on ignition delay time of 10 MJ/Nm3 syngas MILD mixture, because OH mole fraction in MILD mixture drops down as pressure increases, resulting in the delay of the oxidation process.