| The present study applies Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Chemkin models to validate a reduced mechanism developed for combustion of light hydrocarbons. This mechanism will be used to predict the fate of pollutants released from industrial flares with different hydrocarbon feeds. Detailed mechanisms with hundreds of elementary reactions and species are available for the combustion process as a result of the consistent quest of mechanism development over several decades. Computation of the governing chemical transport equations with these detailed kinetic mechanisms is very expensive. The addition of turbulence interaction to the already complicated chemistry makes the computation costly. To make these comprehensive mechanisms applicable for combustion of hydrocarbon fuels using CFD, they first must be reduced to decrease the computational effort. The chemical reaction scheme presented in this work was reduced on the basis of a novel algorithm consisting of sensitivity analysis, quassi steady state, reaction rate data analysis, and skeletal approach as decision variables. The mechanism consists of 50 species and 337 reactions which include the oxidation reactions of high-temperature combustion of H2, CO, CH4, C2H6, C3H8, and C4H10, etc.;In the development of detailed, robust, and comprehensive chemical kinetics for modeling of combustion phenomena, validation of the reaction mechanism through comparison with experimental data of high fidelity is essential. In this work, data from literature reports have been used to validate our simulation results. The key performance indicators of comparison are laminar flame speeds, adiabatic flame temperature, ignition delay tests, and simulating an experimental flare. Chemkin models were developed in order to compare results of laminar flame speeds, adiabatic flame temperature, and ignition delays. The combustion of lab scale flare is simulated using the commercial CFD code FLUENT 6.3 and the domain is created by the meshing software GAMBIT. The axial concentration profiles of various critical species are compared to that of the literature results. |
