The effects of steam addition on the unstable behavior of hydrogen-air lean premixed flames under the adiabatic and non-adiabatic conditions

Abstract

The effects of steam addition on the unstable behavior of hydrogen-air lean premixed flames under the adiabatic and non-adiabatic conditions were investigated using numerical calculations. We adopted the detailed chemical reaction mechanism for hydrogen-oxygen combustion, modeled with seventeen reversible reactions of eight reactive species and a diluent. Two-dimensional unsteady reactive flow was treated, based on the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. The burning velocity of a planar flame decreased as the steam addition and heat loss increased. A sufficiently small disturbance was superimposed on a planar flame to study the characteristics of intrinsic instability. We obtained the relation between the growth rate and wave number, i.e. the dispersion relation, and the linearly most unstable wavelength, i.e. the critical wavelength. As the steam addition increased, the unstable range became narrower, and the critical wavelength became longer. Taking account of heat loss, we obtained smaller growth rates and narrower unstable range. The superimposed disturbance developed owing to intrinsic instability, and then the cellular shape of flame fronts appeared. In cellular flames, compared with planar flames, high (low) concentration of active chemical species was found in downstream of convex (concave) fronts. This was caused by high (low) temperature at convex (concave) fronts due to the diffusive-thermal effects. The concentration of active chemical species became lower with increasing the steam addition and heat loss, which was because of the reduction of flame temperature. Moreover, the burning velocity of a cellular flame increased monotonically with an increase in the scale of premixed flames. The burning velocity of a cellular flame normalized by that of a planar flame increased as the steam addition and heat loss increased. The numerical results denoted that the steam addition and heat loss had a great influence on the unstable behavior of hydrogen-air lean premixed flames.

Keywords

• premixed combustion
• hydrogen flame
• steam addition
• unstable behavior
• heat loss
• flame scale
• burning velocity