Influence of Chemical Kinetics on Predictions of Performance of Syngas Production From Fuel-Rich Combustion of CO2/CH4 Mixture in a Two-Layer Burner

Numerical investigations on partial oxidation combustion of CO2/CH4 mixture were executed for a two-layer burner using a two-dimensional two-temperature model with different detailed chemical reaction mechanisms that are DRM 19, GRI-Mech 1. 2, and GRI-Mech 3.0. Attention was focused on the influence of these mechanisms on predictions of the temperature distributions in the burner, chemical structure as well as syngas production. The equivalence ratio was a fixed value of 1.5, while the volumetric ratio of CO2 to CH4 was changed from 0 to 1. The predicted results were compared with the available experimental data. It was revealed that the chemical reaction mechanisms have little effect on the temperature distribution in the burner except for the exothermic zone. It indicted that the smaller kinetic DRM 19 can precisely predict the temperature distributions in the burner, using DRM 19 was recommended to save computational time when the detailed components of the syngas was not taken into consideration. In addition, all the three mechanisms predicted the same trend of molar fraction of CO, H2, and CO2 with experimental results. Good agreement between the experiment and predictions of major species was obtained by GRI-Mech 1.2 and GRI-Mech 3.0, the two mechanisms had the same accuracy in predicting CO, H2, and CO2 production. However, computations with DRM 19 under-predicted the molar fraction of CO and H2. Furthermore, it was shown that the thermal conductivity of porous media has significant effect on the syngas production. In general, the temperature was increased as the thermal conductivity of the porous media was reduced and the H2 production was increased.