Evaluating the Energy Efficiency Performance of a Micro Combustor with and without Heat Recuperation

Abstract

Micro-combustion research works are motivated by development of portable, autonomous power generators such as the micro TPV with improvement in energy density over batteries. Heat recuperation is a technique which contributes to better energy efficiency performance by recovering heat from the exhaust gas. In this paper, a numerical simulation is carried out to study the impact of incorporating recuperation on the performance of micro modular combustor system. The simulation results have been validated by experiments; achieving close agreement between simulated and experimental data. It was observed that the mean wall temperature, radiation power and emitter efficiency markedly improved with the incorporation of a heat recuperator. In addition, 25.8% enhancement of total radiation power and 30.6% emitter efficiency could be realized when the hydrogen air equivalence ratio was 0.9.

Development of a high-temperature and high-uniformity micro planar combustor for thermophotovoltaics application

“…This combustor efficiency is lower than the value reported in Ref. [34]. This is because in that reference, the length of the micro combustor was longer than this one, furthermore, the side wall radiation was also taken into consideration, however, it is not considered in this work, as a result, the total radiation efficiency is lower in this work.…”

“…These features pave the way to the development of a high performance micro-TPV power generator. [30] Planar CH 4 /air e 1250 Li et al [28] Cylindrical CH 4 /CO/air e 1270 Yang et al [32] Planar H 2 /air e %1280 Yang et al [4] Cylindrical H 2 /air ⁄ e %1400 Jejurkar and Mishra [24] Cylindrical H 2 /air ⁄ %1300 Jiang et al [29] Planar H 2 /air ⁄ e %1200 Jiang et al [34] Planar H 2 /air ⁄ e %1400 Chou et al [35] Planar H 2 /air e %1300…”