Ultra Rich Combustion of Natural Gas to Syngas

Abstract

In this paper the turbulent rich combustion process of perfectly premixed natural gas and oxidizer to syngas is investigated. Also an overview is given of an ultra rich combustion setup that is present at the Laboratory of Thermal Engineering of the University of Twente. The numerical investigation of the process is carried out as follows. The gaseous chemistry is described by a reaction progress variable based combustion model with detailed chemistry. The soot formation is described by the processes of nucleation, surface growth, agglomeration and oxidation. Also radiative heat loss of the gases and the soot particles is taken into account. The numerical model predicts the flow field, gaseous species, temperature, heat loss and soot mass fraction and number of soot particles. The combination of radiation and soot formation models with the combustion model will give a complete picture of the processes in the partial oxidation reactor. The numerical results will be validated with measurements on a reactor operating at pressures from 1 to 6 bar and at equivalence ratios 2 to 4. The measurements are to be done by taking samples from the reactor which are subsequently analyzed with a gas chromatograph and a Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer. The planned experiments will give valuable validation data for the performance of combustion and soot formation models at ultra rich conditions that are not yet available in literature.