Numerical and experimental study of an axisymmetric coflow laminar methane-air diffusion flame at pressures between 5 and 40 atmospheres

A numerical and experimental study of an axisymmetric coflow laminar methane-air diffusion flame at pressures between 5 and 40 atm was conducted to investigate the effect of pressure on the flame structure and soot formation characteristics. Experimental work was carried out in a new high-pressure combustion chamber described in a recent study [K.A. Thomson, Ö.L. Gülder, E.J. Weckman, R.A. Fraser, G.J. Smallwood, D.R. Snelling, Combust. Flame 140 (2005) 222-232]. Radially resolved soot volume fraction was experimentally measured using both spectral soot emission and line-of-sight attenuation techniques. Numerically, the elliptic governing equations were solved in axisymmetric cylindrical coordinates using the finite volume method. Detailed gas-phase chemistry and complex thermal and transport properties were employed in the numerical calculations. The soot model employed in this study accounts for soot nucleation and surface growth using a semiempirical acetylene-based global soot model with oxidation of soot by O₂, OH, and O taken into account. Radiative heat transfer was calculated using the discrete-ordinates method and a nine-band nongray radiative property model. Two soot surface growth submodels were investigated and the predicted pressure dependence of soot yield was compared with available experimental data. The experiment, the numerical model, and a simplified theoretical analysis found that the visible flame diameter decreases with pressure as . The flame-diameter-integrated soot volume fraction increases with pressure as between 5 and 20 atm. The assumption of a square root dependence of the soot surface growth rate on the soot particle surface area predicts the pressure dependence of soot yield in good agreement with the experimental observation. On the other hand, the assumption of linear dependence of the soot surface growth rate on the soot surface area predicts a much faster increase in the soot yield with pressure than that observed experimentally. Although pressure affects the gas-phase chemistry, the increased soot production with increasing pressure seems primarily due to enhanced mixture density and species concentrations in the pressure range investigated. The increased pressure causes enhanced air entrainment into the fuel stream around the burner rim, leading to accelerated fuel pyrolysis. In the pressure range of 20 to 40 atm both the model and experiment show a diminishing sensitivity of sooting propensity to pressure with a greater decrease in the predicted sensitivity of soot propensity to pressure than the experimental results.