Study on the Enhancement Effect of Dielectric Barrier Discharge on the Premixed Methane/Oxygen/Helium Flame Velocity**supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (No. xjj2013086), Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (No. 2014JQ7254) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51477135)

Abstract

Recently, plasma-assisted combustion has become a potentially applicable technology in many combustion scenarios. In this paper, a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma generator is designed to explore the effect of plasma on the CH4 oxidation process, and several properties of combustion are considered. First, in the presence or absence of plasma discharge, physical appearance of the flame is examined and analyzed. Second, the flame propagation velocity is calculated by the flame front extracted from the imaging data with the Bunsen burner method. Finally, the main molecular components and their intensity variation in the flame and the plasma zones are identified with an emission spectrograph to analyze the effect of active species on the combustion process. We also discuss the possible kinetic regime of plasma-assisted combustion. Experimental results imply that plasma discharge applied to the premixed CH4/O2/He mixture significantly raises the flame speed with equivalence ratios ranging from 0.85 to 1.10, with the flame speed improved by 17% to 35%. It can be seen that plasma can improve methane oxidation efficiency in the premixed fuel/oxidizer, especially at a low equivalence ratio.