The Importance of Detailed Chemical Mechanisms in Gas Turbine Combustion Simulations

<p>This paper – in memory of Jürgen Warnatz – summarizes selected recent papers of the Chemical Kinetics Group at the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart. It shows the need for detailed chemical reaction mechanisms to understand practical combustion systems. A comprehensive description of combustion processes based on detailed mechanisms is especially important in the design of new gas turbine combustion chambers and in the optimization of existing ones to improve efficiency and to reduce pollutant emissions, with fuel-flexibility and load-flexibility ever becoming more important. Different aspects of combustion processes where detailed reaction mechanisms provide useful insights will be covered in this paper: Fuels (alternative jet fuels, biomass based fuels), pollutants (soot), diagnostics (chemiluminescence), and thermochemistry. Furthermore, the underlying thermodynamics inevitably connected with detailed reaction schemes will be addressed. Exemplified results will be presented clearly demonstrating the predictive capabilities of detailed reaction mechanisms to be explored in computational fluid dynamic simulations to further optimize technical combustion systems.</p>

Thermal destruction of benzene

The thermal destruction of benzene in methane/air flue gas is studied experimentally using an atmospheric laminar flow reactor in laboratory scale. The reactor is operated at four different fuel equivalent ratios (phi = 0.06, 0.1,0.5, 3.7), and temperatures in the range from 850 to 973 K and realises a residence time of 5 s. Stable-species concentrations are measured by gas chromatography (GC) and high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC), where phenol, acetylene, formaldehyde, acrolein, methane and acetaldehyde are the major hydrocarbon products besides CO and CO2. The augmentation of the temperature from 850 to 973 K increases the benzene conversion rate from 55% to 99%. The experimental results for one fuel equivalent ratio (phi = 0.5) are compared to the benzene model proposed by Emdee et al. (J. Phys. Chem. 92 (1992) 2151-2161). A fair agreement is observed for the benzene consumption and the CO production throughout the temperature range considered here. The small hydrocarbons are not very well matched, which requires further research on the sub-models. Our experimental results on laboratory scale provide a database for the modelling of benzene oxidation in waste incinerators.

Modeling Study on Initial Soot Formation at High Pressures

Detailed modeling of soot formation was carried out using different complex models. Main effort was put on modeling particle inception. The experimental data base consisted of soot volume fraction measurements observed in laminar premixed ethene flames for pressures between 5 and 20 bar and behind reflected shock waves for the pressure range of 4.5 to 55 bar with the fuel ethene and benzene, respectively. Due to the observation time scale in the shock wave experiments (a few milliseconds) induction period and initial soot formation zone are temporally well resolved. The present study investigates the formation and growth of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) and the adjacent section of particle formation by PAH coagulation. For the models the same relatively large reaction gas phase mechanism up to the first aromatic ring structure was used. PAH formation was described either by applying linear lumping of the well known HACA sequence (model I) or by using a detailed chemical kinetic model for species ranging from benzene to coronene (model II). Particle inception and growth was described by applying a standard mechanistic model which comprises coagulation and surface growth. The modeling study showed that growth of soot precursors and particle inception predicted by the PAH reaction mechanism (model II) gives better agreement with measured soot volume fration profiles than the HACA mechanism alone (model I). From the study it was also deduced that a simplified PAH growth model based on reactive coagulation of a relevant growth species (model III) gives similar results. From the comparison with the high pressure flame experiments it was also shown that the modified soot model is able to predict soot formation and oxidation in the post flame zone.