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Ammonia, a chemical that contains high hydrogen quantities, has been presented as a candidate for the production of clean power generation and aerospace propulsion. Although ammonia can deliver more hydrogen per unit volume than liquid hydrogen itself, the use of ammonia in combustion systems comes with the detrimental production of nitrogen oxides, which are emissions that have up to 300 times the greenhouse potential of carbon dioxide. This factor, combined with the lower energy density of ammonia, makes new studies crucial to enable the use of the molecule through methods that reduce emissions whilst ensuring that enough power is produced to support high-energy intensive applications. Thus, this paper presents a numerical study based on the use of novel reaction models employed to characterize ammonia combustion systems. The models are used to obtain Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations via Star-CCM+ with complex chemistry of a 70%–30% (mol) ammonia–hydrogen blend that is currently under investigations elsewhere. A fixed equivalence ratio (1.2), medium swirl (0.8), and confined conditions are employed to determine the flame and species propagation at various operating atmospheres and temperature inlet values. The study is then expanded to high inlet temperatures, high pressures, and high flowrates at different confinement boundary conditions. The results denote how the production of NOx emissions remains stable and under 400 ppm, whilst higher concentrations of both hydrogen and unreacted ammonia are found in the flue gases under high power conditions. The reduction of heat losses (thus higher temperature boundary conditions) has a crucial impact on further destruction of ammonia post-flame, with a raise in hydrogen, water, and nitrogen through the system, thus presenting an opportunity of combustion efficiency improvement of this blend by reducing heat losses. Final discussions are presented as a method to raise power whilst employing ammonia for gas turbine systems.

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Large scale coherent structures play an important role in the behavior of the combustion regime inside any type ofcombustor stabilized by swirl, with special impact on factors such as flame stability, blow off, emissions and theoccurrence of thermo-acoustic oscillations. Lean premixed combustion is widely used and is known to impact many ofthese factors, causing complex interrelationships with any coherent structure formed. Despite the extensiveexperimentation in this matter, the above phenomena are poorly understood. Numerical simulations have been usedto try to explain the development of different regimes, but their extremely complex nature and lack of time dependentvalidation show varied and debatable results. The precessing vortex core (PVC) is a well-known coherent structurewhose development, intensity and occurrence has not been well documented. This paper thus adopts an experimentalapproach to characterize the PVC in a simple swirl burner under combustion conditions so as to reveal the effects ofswirl and other variables on the latter. Aided by a high speed photography (HSP) system, the recognition and extentof several different types of PVCs were observed and discussed.