Study of turbulent flame characteristics of water vapor diluted hydrogen-air micro-mixing combustion

Hydrogen has been regarded as an important alternative fuel, especially in gas turbine applications. However, the premixed combustion of pure hydrogen has problems such as easily flashback and high NO(x )emissions. A more reasonable method of combustion is to use micro-mixing technology combined with water vapor dilution. This work experimentally investigated the influences of dilution rate (D) and equivalence ratio (phi) on the flame characteristics of hydrogen-air micro-mixing combustion diluted with water vapor. Results show that increasing D reduces the flame area by reducing the downstream OH radical signal, which is contrary to the effect of CO(2 )dilution. The flame local curvature radius shows that the micro-mixing combustion is a high turbulence intensity combustion, and the convex structure is more frequent. Moreover, increasing 4 or decreasing D leads to a decrease in the instantaneous average curvature radius (R-ave), indicating more small-scale wrinkle structures are generated. D and phi have a similar influence on the fluctuations of R-ave and flame area in the time domain, while the fluctuation of the flame area is more evident near the lean-burn limit. When D = 25%, the frequency characteristics of the flame structure and chemical reactions are synchronized. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Automated summary

This study experimentally investigated the influences of dilution rate and equivalence ratio on the flame characteristics of hydrogen-air micro-mixing combustion. The results showed that increasing the dilution rate reduces the flame area, while decreasing it generates more small-scale wrinkle structures.