Study of gas fuel jet burning in low oxygen content and high temperature oxidizer

Abstract: During the past decade, new advanced combustion systems that share the same basic concept of using a substantially diluted and high-temperature oxidizer in the reaction volume have gained a great deal of interest regarding their application in industrial and power systems. These novel combustion technologies have proved to offer significant benefits compared to traditional combustion techniques. These benefits include reductions in pollutant emissions and energy consumption, as well as a higher and more uniformly distributed heat flux. This entails the potential to, for example, reduce the size of equipment in industrial units or increase production rates while fuel consumption and the subsequent CO2 emissions are decreased or maintained at the same level.Although the development of these new combustion technologies has occurred fairly recently, it has gained worldwide recognition. During the past few years the technique has been used commercially with several different types of burners. Despite its widespread use, the basic understanding of the chemical-physical phenomena involved is limited, and a better understanding of the combustion phenomena is required for more effective utilization of the technology.The objectives of this work have been to obtain fuel-jet characteristics in combustion under high-temperature, low-oxygen conditions and to develop some theoretical considerations of the phenomena. The effect of the preheat temperature of the combustion air, combustion stoichiometry and the fuel-jet calorific value on flame behavior was investigated. Temperature and heat-flux distribution were also studied using a semi-industrial test furnace to see if similar flame features would be found for the small- and large-scale experiments.Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) was used for the first time to obtain information on the flow dynamics of a fuel jet injected into a crossflow of oxidizer at either a normal temperature or a very high temperature. Light emission spectroscopy was used to collect information on time-averaged radical distributions in the combustion jet.Jet turbulence, time-averaged velocity distribution, fuel-jet mixing, the distribution of radicals such as CH, OH and C2, and flame photographs were investigated. The results showed delayed mixing and combustion under high-temperature low-oxygen-concentration conditions. The combustion air preheat temperature and oxygen concentration were found to have a significant effect on the burning fuel-jet behavior. The results of the semi-industrial-scale tests also showed the features of even flame temperature and heat flux.