AN INVESTIGATION OF LAMINAR FLAME SPEED OF CH4-O2-CO2 MIXTURES

The push for lower carbon emissions in power generation has driven interest in methods of carbon capture and sequestration. One such promising method involves the supercritical CO2 (sCO(2)) power cycle, a system which is powered by oxy-fuel combustion where supercritical carbon dioxide is used as the working fluid. The high CO2 concentration in the combustion products allows for relatively simple extraction of CO2 from the system. Although this is an active field of research, the design of such a combustor requires continued study of oxy-fuel combustion in high levels of CO2 diluent. With that objective in mind, laminar flame experiments were conducted for CH4-O-2-CO2 mixtures at one atmosphere and room temperature, where the relative concentrations of O-2 and CO2 in the oxidizer mixture were 34.0% and 66.0% by mole, respectively. These concentrations were chosen to ensure the flame would propagate quickly enough to overcome the effects of buoyancy, which were observed to become significant below laminar flame speeds of roughly 15 cm/s. A high-speed chemiluminescence imaging diagnostic was employed in place of the traditional schlieren technique. Laminar flame speed was measured from OH* emission at 306 nm for a full range of equivalence ratios, varying from 15.2 cm/s at 0.7 to 24.8 cm/s at stoichiometric. Additionally, images of OH* chemiluminescence of turbulent CH4-O-2-CO2 flames and of quiescent, 5-atm CH4-O-2-CO2 flames at stoichiometric concentration are also presented. These experiments provide useful data for validation of chemical kinetics models for oxy-methane combustion in a CO2 diluent, which can be applied to the modeling of oxy-methane combustion for supercritical CO2 power cycles.