Sharif Digital Repository

In this work, a hybrid finite-volume-element method is used to solve turbulent reacting flow in a combustion chamber considering detailed chemical kinetics. The hybrid unification enables the solver to treat the reacting flow in very complex geometries and to respect the required physical considerations fully. We employ two-equations standard κ-ω turbulence model incorporated with suitable wall functions to model the turbulence behavior. Assuming optically-thin gases, radiation effects are taken into account in our simulations. A flamelet combustion model is applied to consider the large detailed chemical kinetics, which can normally occur within combustion processes. Turbulence-chemistry... 

In this study, exergy analysis and second law efficiency of gas heaters with reactive combustion processes are considered. The reactive combustion of natural gas is modeled via a chain of eight chemical reactions along with first and second law of thermodynamics. The main constitutional elements react in combustion chamber is considered at constant pressure and temperature of the basic elements hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen from the fuel and air. Heat transfer is modeled assuming free convection and radiation mechanisms from gas heater outer surfaces. The governed equations were solved using Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software tool. Results of this study reveal that... 

As is known, jet propulsion fuels are rather complex with combustion resulting in a vast range of chemical compounds. So, their real modeling is rather hard and the application of final constructed models is restricted to a narrow band of real propulsion jet fuels. The main objective of this study is to extend suitable surrogate fuel models to reliably predict the combustion and soot characteristics of the equivalent jet propulsion fuel. In this regard, the combustion of proposed surrogate fuels is numerically studied in the above chosen combustion chamber. Of importance, the surrogate fuels should be proposed suitably to represent the correct physical characteristics and the real chemical... 

Combustion emission is one of the most important issues in the design of industries. Todays' strict environmental standards have limited the productions of CO, NOx, SOx, and other hazardous pollutants from the related industries. In this work, we study a typical oil refinery incinerator, which is used to burn waste gases residue produced during bitumen production process. The waste gas mainly includes a mixture including N2, H2O-vapor, and O2 species. Additionally, there are significant amounts of CO species and CxHy droplets in the waste gas composition. The measurements show that the CO emission becomes so crucial in high flow rate of feeding waste gas to the incinerator. Here, we... 

Mathematical formulation and modeling of combustion processes is an important tool in the understanding of this phenomenon. Determination of equilibrium temperature and composition is often the first stage in calculation of combustion characteristics. There are number of different techniques for simulation of combustion process. In this study a basic model has been developed based on the minimization of Gibb's free energy to simulate the combustion processes. A nonlinear mathematical optimization has been developed based on Lagrange multipliers and solved using Quasi-Newton method written in MathCAD environment. The effect of various parameters such as initial temperature, pressure, and... 

The proper modeling of radiation is of great importance in numerical simulation of combustion processes. A simple gray weighted-sum-of-gray-gases (WSGG) model has been intensively used in CFD simulations of industrial combustion applications, mainly because of its low computational costs. However, the gray assumption is far from the real behavior of non-gray combustion gases. This could consequently affect the accuracy of temperature field and heat flux distribution predictions. On the other hand, modern non-gray global radiation models such as the standard spectral line-based weighted-sum-od-gray-gases (SLW) model are still computationally expensive for many engineering purposes. To... 

The main function of a fired heater in a petrochemical site is to produce supersaturated steam. Due to extremely difficult working conditions and high temperatures, there is a very high probability of failures in different parts of a fired heater. In the fired heater under study, tube guides are frequently damaged due to malfunctions and fractures in bolt connections. To investigate the nature of such fractures, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Finite Element (FE) method, Charpy impact test and fractography were used. To obtain the temperature of various components of the fired heater, a CFD analysis was carried out by considering the combustion process and modeling the central and side... 

In connection to present energy demand and waste management crisis in Pakistan, refuse-derived fuel (RDF) is gaining importance as a potential co-fuel for existing coal fired power plants. This research focuses on the co-combustion of low-quality local coal with RDF as a mean to reduce environmental issues in terms of waste management strategy. The combustion characteristics and kinetics of coal, RDF, and their blends were experimentally investigated in a micro-thermal gravi-metric analyzer at four heating rates of 10, 20, 30, and 40 °C/min to ramp the temperature from 25 to 1000 °C. The mass percentages of RDF in the coal blends were 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%, respec-tively. The results show... 

The reaction progress variable is a crucial concept in the advanced flamelet combustion models. As a controlling variable, a well-defined progress variable must consider the essential features of the combustion process. It is usually a heuristically defined linear combination of some major chemical species mass fractions. However, such a simple definition could lead to inaccurate results for the fuel-rich reactive mixtures or complicated fuels, due to the vast number of chemical species in the combustion process. In this paper, a new method for generating a reaction progress variable is proposed through solving a constrained optimisation problem. The proposed method uses a genetic algorithm... 

In this study, a thermodynamic cycle simulation of a conventional four-stroke SI engine has been carried out to predict the engine performance and emissions. The first law of thermodynamics has been applied to determine in-cylinder temperature and pressure as a function of crank angle. The Newton-Raphson method was used for the numerical solution of the equations. The non-differential form of equations resulted in the simplicity and ease of the solution to predict the engine performance. Two-zone model for the combustion process simulation has been used and the mass burning rate was predicted by simulating spherical propagation of the flame front. Also, temperature dependence of specific... 

This paper experimentally investigates the influence of hydrogen enrichment on the combustion and emission characteristics of a diesel HCCI engine using a modified Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine. Three fuels, n-heptane and two middle distillates with cetane numbers of 46.6 and 36.6, are studied. The results show that hydrogen enrichment retards the combustion phasing and reduces the combustion duration of a diesel HCCI engine. Besides, hydrogen enrichment increases the power output and fuel conversion efficiency, and improves the combustion stability. However, hydrogen enrichment may narrow the operational compression ratio range and increase the knocking tendency. Both the overall... 

With the declining energy resources and increase of pollutant emissions, a great deal of efforts has been focused on the development of alternatives for fossil fuels. One of the promising alternative fuels to gasoline in the internal combustion engine is natural gas [1-5]. The application of natural gas in current internal combustion engines is realistic due to its many benefits. The higher thermal efficiency due to the higher octane value and lower exhaust emissions including CO2 as a result of the lower carbon to hydrogen ratio of the fuel are the two important feature of using CNG as an alternative fuel. It is well known that computer simulation codes are valuable economically as a cost...