Computational Study on the Spherical Laminar Flame Speed of Hydrogen-Air Mixtures

The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have been developed to analyze the correlation equation for laminar flame speed of hydrogen-air mixtures. This analysis was carried out on the combustion of hydrogen-air mixtures performed at the spherical bomb experiment facility consists of a spherical vessel equipped (563 mm internal diameter). The facility has been designed and built at CNRS-ICARE laboratory. The simulation was carried out using the reactingFoam solver, one of a transient chemical reaction solver in OpenFOAM 5.0. The LaunderSharmaKE model was applied for turbulent flow. The interaction of the chemical reaction with the turbulent flow was taken into account using PaSR (Partial Stirred Reactor) model with 19 elementary reactions for the hydrogen combustion. The initial condition of spherical flame analysis was set so as to be consistent with those of the experiment. The position of the flame front was detected by the steep drop of hydrogen mass fraction in the spherical radii, and the flame propagation velocity was estimated from the time-position relationship. The analysis result showed the characteristic of spherical flame acceleration was qualitatively reproduced even though it has a discrepancy with the experiment. After validating the calculation of spherical experiments, a laminar burning velocity correlation is presented using the same boundary conditions with the variation of hydrogen concentration, temperature, and pressure. The calculation of laminar flame speed of hydrogen-air mixtures by reactingFoam use reference temperature Tref = 293 K and reference pressure Pref = 1 atm with validated in the range of hydrogen concentration 6–20%; range of temperature 293–493 K; and range of pressure 1–3 atm.