Abstract
The combustion of ammonia (NH3) has attracted wide interest in fuel vehicle engines, marine engines, and power generators to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. Unfortunately, the relatively low laminar flame speed presents a technical barrier for this renewable fuel to be used in practice. This work is concerned with numerical examining the effects of elevating inlet temperature on the laminar burning velocity of NH3/air flames with various contents of dimethyl ether (DME) using 1D freely propagating flame calculations, and to shed light on the flame enhancement mechanism. For this, the mechanism is first validated by comparing the numerical predictions with experimental data. Results show that increasing the inlet temperature has a positive effect on the laminar burning velocity of pure NH3/DME/air flames. It is revealed that elevating inlet temperature contributes to a higher adiabatic flame temperature, which is beneficial to the overall chemical reaction rate. Furthermore, the thermal diffusivity of the binary mixture is observed to increase substantially as well. Further kinetic and sensitivities analyses reveal that the inlet temperature has a minimal effect on the reaction pathway, leading to the relative importance of the dominant chain branching over terminating reaction steps to be varied negligibly. The present work confirms that the flame speed enhancement with increasing inlet temperature is primarily the synergetic result of the thermal and diffusion effects, rather than the chemical effect.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (grant no. CPS20-03-002, grant no. 452DISDZ) and National Research Foundation Singapore (grant no. NRF2016 NRF-NSFC001-102). Tao Cai would like to thank College of Engineering, University of Canterbury for providing PhD studentship.
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Article type: Contributed by Asian Congress on Gas Turbines 2020 (August 18–19, 2021, China).
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Cai, T., Zhao, D. Temperature Dependence of Laminar Burning Velocity in Ammonia/Dimethyl Ether-air Premixed Flames. J. Therm. Sci. 31, 189–197 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11630-022-1549-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11630-022-1549-1