Flameless combustion offers many advantages over conventional combustion, particularly uniform temperature distribution and lower emissions. In this paper, a new strategy is proposed and adopted to scale up a burner operating in flameless combustion mode from a heat release density of 5.4 to 21 MW/m 3 (thermal input 21.5 -84.7 kW) with kerosene fuel. A swirl flow based configuration was adopted for air injection and pressure swirl type nozzle with an SMD 35-37 µm was used to inject the fuel. Initially, flameless combustion was stabilized for a thermal input of 21.5 kW ( =5.37 MW/m 3 ). Attempts were made to scale this combustor to higher intensities i.e. 10.2, 16.3 and 21.1 MW/m 3 . However, an increase in fuel flow rate led to incomplete combustion and accumulation of unburned fuel in the combustor. Two major difficulties were identified as possible reasons for unsustainable flameless combustion at the higher intensities (i) A constant spray cone angle and SMD increases the droplet number density (ii) Reactants dilution ratio ( ) decreased with increased thermal input. To solve these issues, a modified combustor configuration, aided by numerical computations was adopted, providing a chamfer near the outlet to increase the . Detailed experimental investigations showed that flameless combustion mode was achieved at high intensities with an evenly distributed reaction zone and temperature in the combustor at all heat intensities. The emissions of CO, NO x and HC for all heat intensities (Ф=1 -0.6) varied between 11 -41, 6 -19 and 0 -9 ppm, respectively.These emissions are well within the range of emissions from other flameless combustion systems reported in the literature. The acoustic emission levels were also observed to be reduced by 8-9 dB at all conditions.
A simple model based on a Perfectly Stirred Reactor (PSR) is proposed for moderate or intense low-oxygen dilution (MILD) combustion. The PSR calculation is performed covering the entire flammability range and the tabulated chemistry approach is used with a presumed joint probability density function (PDF). The jet, in hot and diluted coflow experimental setup under MILD conditions, is simulated using this reactor model for two oxygen dilution levels. The computed results for mean temperature, major and minor species mass fractions are compared with the experimental data and simulation results obtained recently using a multi-environment transported PDF approach. Overall, a good agreement is observed at three different axial locations for these comparisons despite the overpredicted peak value of CO formation. This suggests that MILD combustion can be effectively modelled by the proposed PSR model with lower computational
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