Modeling of Turbulent Natural Gas and Biogas Flames of the Delft Jet-in-Hot-Coflow Burner: Effects of Coflow Temperature, Fuel Temperature and Fuel Composition on the Flame Lift-Off Height

The structure of a turbulent non-premixed flame of a biogas fuel in a hot and diluted coflow mimicking moderate and intense low dilution (MILD) combustion is studied numerically. Biogas fuel is obtained by dilution of Dutch natural gas (DNG) with CO2. The results of biogas combustion are compared with those of DNG combustion in the Delft Jet-in-Hot-Coflow (DJHC) burner. New experimental measurements of lift-off height and of velocity and temperature statistics have been made to provide a database for evaluating the capability of numerical methods in predicting the flame structure. Compared to the lift-off height of the DNG flame, addition of 30 % carbon dioxide to the fuel increases the lift-off height by less than 15 %. Numerical simulations are conducted by solving the RANS equations using Reynolds stress model (RSM) as turbulence model in combination with EDC (Eddy Dissipation Concept) and transported probability density function (PDF) as turbulence-chemistry interaction models. The DRM19 reduced mechanism is used as chemical kinetics with the EDC model. A tabulated chemistry model based on the Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) is adopted in the PDF method. The table describes a non-adiabatic three stream mixing problem between fuel, coflow and ambient air based on igniting counterflow diffusion flamelets. The results show that the EDC/DRM19 and PDF/FGM models predict the experimentally observed decreasing trend of lift-off height with increase of the coflow temperature. Although more detailed chemistry is used with EDC, the temperature fluctuations at the coflow inlet (approximately 100K) cannot be included resulting in a significant overprediction of the flame temperature. Only the PDF modeling results with temperature fluctuations predict the correct mean temperature profiles of the biogas case and compare well with the experimental temperature distributions.