Feasibility of a methane reduced chemical kinetics mechanism in laminar flame velocity of hydrogen enriched methane flames simulations

The main purpose of this work is to test the validation of use of a four step reaction mechanism to simulate the laminar speed of hydrogen enriched methane flame. The laminar velocities of hydrogen-methane-air mixtures are very important in designing and predicting the progress of combustion and performance of combustion systems where hydrogen is used as fuel. In this work, laminar flame velocities of different composition of hydrogen-methane-air mixtures (from 0% to 40% hydrogen) have been calculated for variable equivalence ratios (from 0.5 to 1.5) using the flame propagation module (FSC) of the chemical kinetics software Chemkin 4.02. Our results were tested against an extended database of laminar flame speed measurements from the literature and good agreements were obtained especially for fuel lean and stoichiometric mixtures for the whole range of hydrogen blends. However, in the case of fuel rich mixtures, a slight overprediction (about 10%) is observed. Note that this overprediction decreases significantly with increasing hydrogen content. This research demonstrates that reduced chemical kinetics mechanisms can well reproduce the laminar burning velocity of methane-hydrogen-air mixtures at lean and stoichiometric mixture flame for hydrogen content in the fuel up to 40%. The use of such reduced mechanisms in complex combustion device can reduce the available computational resources and cost because the number of species is reduced.