Combustion Characteristics of a Premixed Burner in a Stirling Engine for a Domestic Cogeneration System

The availability of thermal energy has been widely recognized recently, and the cascade usage of thermal energy from combustion has been encouraged. Within this framework, a 1-kW-class Stirling-engine-based cogeneration system has been proposed as a unit of a distributed energy system. The capacity has been designed to be adequate for domestic usage, which requires high compactness as well as low emissions and noise. To develop a highly efficient system satisfying these requirements, a premixed slot-type short-flame burner has been proposed, and a series of experiments has been performed to understand its combustion characteristics. Flame images have been captured to observe the dependence of the flame mode on the combustion load and air/fuel ratio. The exhaust gas has been sampled and analyzed to study the emission characteristics for each flame mode.