Predictive tools for turbulent combustion of hydrogen-enriched natural gas through carefully reduced kinetic mechanisms

The growing crisis of serious environmental degradation necessitates the demand for alternative fuels. Hydrogen-enhanced natural gas is playing an increasingly important role to decarbonise the gas going into people’s homes and for power generation.

However, there are substantial knowledge gaps concerning the turbulent combustion and explosion characteristics of hydrogen-enhanced natural gas, which creates a great challenge in associated combustion systems and safety issues. Such knowledge gaps hinder the progress of wide deployment of hydrogen-enhanced natural gas to achieve the ambitious target for decarbonisation.​

This project aims to bridge these knowledge gaps by gaining insight about the turbulent combustion characteristics of hydrogen-enhanced natural gas through numerical studies aided by existing experimental data. The fellow will develop a robust modelling approach for the combustion of such blended fuel with reduced chemical reaction mechanism to facilitate effective coupling with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models.

The reduced mechanism will be designed to firstly reproduce the fundamental combustion characteristics concerning ignition and laminar flame speed for validation before being implemented in open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code OpenFOAM.