Abstract
Several recent detailed chemical kinetic models have been computationally investigated to assess the predictive competency of nitrogen oxides for gaseous low carbon number fuels. The objective is to understand how the recent models perform in predicting nitric oxide (NO) emissions at atmospheric and high-pressure including rich flames. Three different detailed kinetic models are considered for this assessment. For kinetic analysis, we employed one-dimensional laminar premixed flame (LFS) calculations using kinetic tool Cantera (v2.4) against measurements of laminar flame speed and NO speciation. The study is conducted at atmospheric and higher pressure (10, 14.6 atm) for varying equivalence ratios. In general, the kinetic models satisfactorily reproduced the LFS data. For NO prediction, acceptable emulation of measured data is observed at 1 atm for lean to slightly rich flames (Φ = 0.5–1.05), while greater discrepancies emerge at the rich flame conditions. At higher pressure, significant underprediction are also observed across for all three models. We found that prediction discrepancies at the rich mixtures are primarily linked to the prompt-NO pathways. Furthermore, rate of production analysis manifests that a consensus for the main reaction channels for NO at rich flames is yet to be established for these recent models.
