Study on Oxy-Methane Flame Stability in a Cylindrical Porous Medium Burner

Combustion in a porous medium can be beneficial for enhancing reaction rate and temperature uniformity. Therefore, considering the combination with oxy-fuel combustion can address some shortcomings in oxy-fuel burners, a cylindrical two-layer porous burner model is established based on OpenFOAM in this paper. A two-temperature equation model is adopted for the simulation of the heat transfer process. The CH4 skeletal kinetic mechanism is adopted for complex chemistry integration based on OpenSMOKE++. Corresponding experimental methods were used for complementary studies. The walls of the burner are wrapped with three types of thermal insulation materials to present different levels of heat loss. The results show that considering the convection and radiative heat loss of the burner wall, the temperature near the wall is reduced by more than 300 K compared to the adiabatic condition. As a result, the flame propagation speed and CO oxidation rate slowed down. The stable range will be destructively narrowed by more than 50%, and CO emissions will increase by more than 10 times. These defects will be aggravated by increasing the diameter of the burner. It is observed that when the diameter of the burner increases from the initial 5 cm to 10 cm, the effect of heat loss on the stable range is insignificant.

Automated summary

This paper establishes a cylindrical two-layer porous burner model combined with oxy-fuel combustion to study the effects of combustion in porous media on reaction rate and temperature uniformity. The experimental results show that the heat loss from the burner walls leads to a decrease in temperature, which slows down the flame propagation speed and CO oxidation rate.