Hydrogen concentration effects on swirl-stabilized oxy-colorless distributed combustion

Oxy-colorless distributed combustion is a novel combustion technique to achieve more uniform and controlled thermal field, enhance flame stability, and reduce emissions including combustion noise. Colorless distributed combustion (CDC) conditions was achieved through controlled entrainment of hot reactive gaseous species. This allowed for reduction of oxygen concentration to provide improved mixture preparation for distributed combustion with the reaction zone distributed across the entire volume of the combustor. In this study, oxy-colorless distributed combustion was examined for fuel flexibility using different mixtures of methane and hydrogen diluted with 10% each of N-2 and CO2 to represent low heating value fuels. The oxidizer used was an O-2-CO2 mixture that eliminated the formation of NOx from the combustor. The evolved OH* chemiluminescence signatures were recorded for various hydrogen concentrations in the fuel at equivalence ratios in the range of 0.6-0.9 under distributed combustion condition. At Phi = 0.9, transition to CDC initiated at oxygen concentrations of 17%, 19% and 21% for fuels having a hydrogen concentration of 60%, 50% and 40% (on volume basis), respectively. Differences in transition point were attributed to higher flame speed associated with more hydrogen in the fuel. Gaseous fuel having high hydrogen concentration provided more distributed OH* flame structures at lower oxygen concentration while the flame stability enhanced at higher oxygen concentration. Oxy-colorless conditions provided only 10-30 ppm CO even at high oxygen concentration and high (0.9) equivalence ratio. The results showed fuel flexibility from different heating value gaseous fuels having high hydrogen content. The results provided very low CO emission and enhanced flame stability under oxy-colorless distributed combustion for the low heating value fuels using O-2-CO2 mixture as the oxidant.