Investigation of combustion characteristics of methane-hydrogen fuels

Numerical investigations of combustion characteristics of methane-hydrogen fuel used at present in tube furnaces of some petroleum refineries are carried out and possible problems related to change-over of existing furnaces from natural gas to methane-hydrogen fuel are analyzed. The effect of the composition of the blended fuel, associated temperature and emissivity of combustion products, temperature of combustion chamber walls, mean beam length, and heat release on variation in the radiation heat flux is investigated. The methane concentration varied from 0 to 100%. The investigations were carried out both at arbitrary given gas temperatures and at effective temperatures determined based on solving a set of equations at various heat-release rates of the combustion chamber and depended on the adiabatic combustion temperature and the temperature at the chamber output. The approximation dependence for estimation of the radiation heat exchange rate in the radiant chamber of the furnace at change-over to fuel with a greater hydrogen content is obtained. Hottel data were applied in the present work in connection with the impossibility to use approximated formulas recommended by the normative method for heat calculation of boilers to determine the gas emissivity, which are limited by the relationship of partial pressures of water steam and carbon dioxide in combustion products $$\left( {p_{H_2 O} /p_{CO_2 } = 0.2 - 2.0} \right)$$. The effect of the methane-hydrogen fuel on the equilibrium concentration of nitrogen oxides is also investigated. © 2015, Pleiades Publishing, Inc.