Reduced Mechanism Approach of Modeling Premixed Propane-Air Mixture Using ANSYS Fluent

In combustion computational analysis, reduced mechanisms are often used in place of detailed kinetic chemistry. Since the computational costs of including all the species in the reactor model are always prohibitively high, several reduced mechanisms have been developed for propane and other hydrocarbon oxidation. In this study we employed ANSYS Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package, (hereinafter referred to as Fluent) to analyze propane oxidation mechanism in a conical reactor. The k -epsilon scheme was used to model the effects of turbulence. The reaction kinetics employed in this study is that based on the work of Westbrook and Dryer [14]. This simplified model consists of 5 chemical reactions and 12 species, namely, C3H8, CO2, CO, H2O, NO, O-2, O, H, N, OH, N-2 and H-2. The computed mass fractions of the species, C3H8, CO2, CO and H2O were found to be in agreement measured values presented in [20]. The results show that the bulk of the turbulent kinetic energy was produced in the inlet jet. The computed values of y* were found to confirm that the use of the law-of-the-wall functions was valid and also showed that the computational mesh for the present model was appropriate.