On the Influence of Kinetic Uncertainties on the Accuracy of Numerical Modeling of an Industrial Flameless Furnace Fired With NH3/H2 Blends: A Numerical and Experimental Study

Ammonia/hydrogen-fueled combustion represents a very promising solution for the future energy scenario. This study aims to shed light and understand the behavior of ammonia/hydrogen blends under flameless conditions. A first-of-its-kind experimental campaign was conducted to test fuel flexibility for different ammonia/hydrogen blends in a flameless burner, varying the air injector and the equivalence ratio. NO emissions increased drastically after injecting a small amount of NH3 in pure hydrogen (10% by volume). An optimum trade-off between NOx emission and ammonia slip was found when working sufficiently close to stoichiometric conditions (phi = 0.95). In general, a larger air injector (ID25) reduces the emissions, especially at phi = 0.8. A well-stirred reactor network with exhaust recirculation was developed exchanging information with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, to model chemistry in diluted conditions. Such a simplified system was then used in two ways: 1) to explain the experimental trends of NOx emissions varying the ammonia molar fraction within the fuel blend and 2) to perform an uncertainty quantification study. A sensitivity study coupled with latin hypercube sampling (LHS) was used to evaluate the impact of kinetic uncertainties on NOx prediction in a well-stirred reactor network model. The influence of the identified uncertainties was then tested in more complex numerical models, such as Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations of the furnace. The major over-predictions of existing kinetic scheme was then alleviated significantly, confirming the crucial role of detailed kinetic mechanisms for accurate predictive simulations of NH3/H-2 mixtures in flameless regime.