Ignition Delay At Various High Pressures An Experimental Study

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2019 in the subject Engineering - Chemical Engineering, course: M.TECH, language: English, abstract: This work is an experimental study for the measurement of ignition delay characteristics of burning fuel sprays in cylindrical combustion chambers. It is carried out on hot air and high pressure. The objective of the study is to investigation the effect of hot air temperature and a well as high pressure on ignition delay of diesel fuel sprays. The effect of blending of n-Pentane with pure diesel was investigated. An experimental set up was design for this purpose with the emphasis on optical method for measurement of ignition delay at various pressures. The results presented here show that ignition delay of diesel fuel spray decreases with increase in the temperature and pressure of hot air. Results also show the effect of methyl group being more dominant at low ignition temperatures and that of alkyl group being more dominant at higher temperature. Blending of n-pentane with diesel fuel, increase its ignition delay at low ignition temperatures. However, as the concentration of blending fuel was increased beyond 30%, the ignition temperature increase. Ignition temperature for 40% pentane blends is much higher that the pure diesel.

A new shock tube targeting low temperature, high pressure, and long test times was designed and installed at the Turbomachinery Laboratory in December of 2008. The single-pulse shock tube uses either lexan diaphragms or die-scored aluminum disks of up to 4 mm in thickness. The modular design of the tube allows for optimum operation over a large range of thermodynamic conditions from 1 to 100 atm and between 600-4000 K behind the reflected shock wave. The new facility allows for ignition delay time, chemical kinetics, high-temperature spectroscopy, vaporization, atomization, and solid particulate experiments. An example series of ignition delay time experiments was made on mixtures of CH4/C2H6/O2/Ar at pressures from 1 to 30.7 atm, intermediate temperatures from 1082 to 2248 K, varying dilutions (between 75 and 98% diluent), and equivalence ratios ranging from fuel lean (0.5) to fuel rich (2.0) in this new facility. The percentage by volume variation and equivalence ratios for the mixtures studied were chosen to cover a wide parameter space not previously well studied. Results are then used to validate and improve a detailed kinetics mechanism which models the oxidation and ignition of methane and other higher order hydrocarbons, through C4, with interest in further developing reactions important to methane- and ethane-related chemistry.

The author believes, on the basis of experimental ignition-lag data, that the character of a fuel cannot be stated in terms of a single constant (such as octane or cetane number) but that at least two and generally three constants are required. Thus no correlation between knock ratings can be expected if in one set of tests the charge temperature was varied while in the other the charge pressure was varied. For this reason, he favors knock rating being based on an equation characterizing the ignition lag of the fuel as a function of pressure and temperature of the charge.

Applications of natural gases that contain high levels of hydrogen have become a primary interest in the gas turbine market. For reheat gas turbines, understanding of the ignition delay times of high-hydrogen natural gases is important for two reasons. First, if the ignition delay time is too short, autoignition can occur in the mixer before the primary combustor. Second, the flame in the secondary burner is stabilized by the ignition delay time of the fuel. While the ignition delay times of hydrogen and of the individual hydrocarbons in natural gases can be considered well known, there have been few previous experimental studies into the effects of different levels of hydrogen on the ignition delay times of natural gases at gas turbine conditions. In order to examine the effects of hydrogen content at gas turbine conditions, shock-tube experiments were performed on nine combinations of an L9 matrix. The L9 matrix was developed by varying four factors: natural gas higher-order hydrocarbon content of 0, 18.75, or 37.5%; hydrogen content of the total fuel mixture of 30, 60, or 80%; equivalence ratios of 0.3, 0.5, or 1; and pressures of 1, 10, or 30 atm. Temperatures ranged from 1092 K to 1722 K, and all mixtures were diluted in 90% Ar. Correlations for each combination were developed from the ignition delay times and, using these correlations, a factor sensitivity analysis was performed. It was found that hydrogen played the most significant role in ignition delay time. Pressure was almost as important as hydrogen content, especially as temperature increased. Equivalence ratio was slightly more important than hydrocarbon content of the natural gas, but both were less important than pressure or hydrogen content. Further analysis was performed using ignition delay time calculations for the full matrix of combinations (27 combinations for each natural gas) using a detailed chemical kinetics mechanism. Using these calculations, separate L9 matrices were developed for each natural gas. Correlations from the full matrix and the L9 matrix for each natural gas were found to be almost identical in each case, verifying that a thoughtfully prepared L9 matrix can indeed capture the major effects of an extended matrix.

Phenomenology of Diesel Combustion and Modeling Diesel is the most efficient combustion engine today and it plays an important role in transport of goods and passengers on land and on high seas. The emissions must be controlled as stipulated by the society without sacrificing the legendary fuel economy of the diesel engines. These important drivers caused innovations in diesel engineering like re-entrant combustion chambers in the piston, lower swirl support and high pressure injection, in turn reducing the ignition delay and hence the nitric oxides. The limits on emissions are being continually reduced. The- fore, the required accuracy of the models to predict the emissions and efficiency of the engines is high. The phenomenological combustion models based on physical and chemical description of the processes in the engine are practical to describe diesel engine combustion and to carry out parametric studies. This is because the injection process, which can be relatively well predicted, has the dominant effect on mixture formation and subsequent course of combustion. The need for improving these models by incorporating new developments in engine designs is explained in Chapter 2. With “model based control programs” used in the Electronic Control Units of the engines, phenomenological models are assuming more importance now because the detailed CFD based models are too slow to be handled by the Electronic Control Units. Experimental work is necessary to develop the basic understanding of the pr- esses.

Much work has been done to model and understand alcohol oxidation individually. Comparative studies of ignition delay times of alcohols, however, are limited. The thesis presents a comparative study of their ignition delay times. Mixtures of methanol, ethanol, n-propanol and n-butanol and synthetic air are ignited behind reflected shock waves at high temperatures (1070K-1760K). The ignition delay times are measured in a shock tube as equivalence ratio, argon to oxygen ratio (dilution) and pressure are changed to highlight trends and similarities between the fuels. Experimental results have indicated that these fuels have comparable ignition delay times, which may indicate similarities of the oxidation pathways of the alcohols. The results are compared against simulations of chemical kinetic models from the literature. The Marinov model is found to be the most accurate of the models. However, the simulations fail to show the similarity of the delay times at fixed...