Numerical study on the minimum ignition energy of a methane-air mixture

Abstract In this paper, a semi-detailed mechanism is used to calculate the minimum ignition energy (MIE) of methane-air mixtures, with all calculations conducted using ANSYS Fluent software. Ignition behaviors between success and failure were analyzed, and the effect of isothermal and adiabatic wall condition, equivalence ratio and electrode wall temperature on the MIE were also numerically investigated. From time histories of temperature and species profiles it is easy to determine when a successful ignition occurs. There are big differences between the MIE predictions using the adiabatic wall and isothermal wall conditions. For different equivalence ratio results, we consider our numerical results to be considerably more accurate than previous studies.