Combustion Characteristics of Hydrogen-methane Hybrid Fuels

ABSTRACT As the development and increasingly widespread use of IGCC and zero emission energy system, the development of advanced combustion capabilities for gaseous hydrogen and hydrogen rich fuels in gas turbine applications is becoming an area of much great concern. The combustion characteristics of hydrogen rich fuel is very different from nature gas in aspects such as flame stability, flame temperature, combustor acoustics, pollutant emissions, combustor efficiency, and some other important quantities. However, few of these issues are clearly understood by far. The purpose of this paper is to compare in detail the combustion performance of hydrogen-methane hybrid fuels with various volumetric H 2 fractions ranging from 0% to 100%. Meanwhile, the comparison of pure H 2 , pure CH 4 , and 80%H 2 +20%CH 4 was the emphasis. 80%H 2 +20%CH 4 hybrid gas is selected expressly because its component is approximately equal to the outcome of a hydrogen production test bed of our laboratory, and it is considered by the team to be a potential transition fuel of gas turbines between nature gas and pure hydrogen. Detailed experimental measurements and numerical simulations were conducted using a coflow jet diffusion burner. It was found that in the extent of experiments, when under equal general power, the flame length of hydrogen contained fuels wasn't much shorter than methane, and didn't get shorter with the increase of H 2 fraction as expected. That was because the shortening tendency caused by the increase of H 2 fraction was counteracted partially by the increase of fuel velocity, results of which was the extending of flame length. Maximum temperature of H 2 flame was 1733K, which was 30K higher than 80%H 2 +20%CH 4 and 120K higher than CH 4. All of the highest temperatures of the three fuels were presented at the recirculation zone of the flame. Although it seemed that the flame of CH 4 had the longest dimension compared with H 2 contained fuels when observed through photos, the high temperature region of flames was getting longer when increasing H 2 fractions. Curves of temperature distribution predicted by all the four combustion models in FLUENT investigated here had a departure away from the experimental data. Among the models, Flamelet model was the one whose prediction was comparatively close to the experimental results. Flame of H 2 and 80%H 2 +20%CH 4 had a much better stability than flame of CH 4 , they could reach a so called recirculating flame phase and never been blew out in the extent of experiments. On the contrary, CH 4 flames were blew out easily soon after they were lifted up. Distribution of OH concentration at the root of flames showed that the flame boundary of H 2 and 80%H 2 +20%CH 4 was more clearly than CH 4. That is to say, at the root of the flame, combustion of H 2 was the most intensive one, 80%H 2 +20%CH 4 took the second place, while CH 4 was the least. NOx emissions didn't show a linear relationship with the volumetric fraction of H 2 , but showed an exponential uptrend instead. It presented a fairly consistent tendency with flame