On Numerical Simulation of Black Carbon (Soot) Emissions from Non-Premixed Flames

Abstract

Soot emissions (PM 2.5) from land-based sources pose a substantial health risk, and now are subject to new and tougher EPA regulations. Flaring produces significant amount of particulate matter in the form of soot, along with other harmful gas emissions. A few experimental studies have previously been done on flames burning in a controlled condition. In these lab-experiments, great effort is needed to collect, sample, and analyze the soot so that the emission rate can be calculated. Soot prediction in flares is tricky due to variable conditions such as radiation and surrounding air available for combustion. Work presented in this paper simulates some lab-scale flares in which soot yield for methane flame mixture was measured under different conditions. The focus of this paper is on soot modeling with various flair operating conditions. The computational fluid dynamics software ANSYS Fluent 13 is used. Different soot models were explored along with other chemistry mechanisms. The effect of radiation models, quantity of air supplied, different fuel mixture and its effect over soot formations were also studied.

Reduced combustion mechanism for C1–C4 hydrocarbons and its application in computational fluid dynamics flare modeling

“…Once mixed, the chemistry can be treated as in a chemical equilibrium with the equilibrium model, with the steady laminar flamelet model (Peters, 1984), or significantly away from chemical equilibrium with the unsteady laminar flamelet model. A nonadiabatic steady-state laminar flamelet model is used for all the cases (Patki et al, 2014). At this point, CHEMKIN mechanism file is imported for generating flamelets.…”

Combustion of Syngas in Intersecting Burners Using the Interferometry Method

“…NO x Formation. Because the performance of the combustion is affected by the NO x emission rate, 32 the numerical results for generation rates of prompt NO x and thermal NO x are analyzed. The distribution of the mass fraction in the base case is illustrated in Figure 16.…”