Numerical investigation of methane-air counterflow premixed flame into a newly designed plus-shaped chamber with platinum and rhodium catalysts coated walls

ABSTRACT

In the current investigation, the counterflow methane/air premixed flame is placed in a plus-shaped burner and analyzed with and without platinum and rhodium catalytic walls. The effect of having the catalysts near the flame on the flame structure and pollutant emission is studied. To solve the problem, ReactingFOAM solver of OpenFOAM platform is used. OpenFOAM is an open-source CFD software that use object-oriented C⁺⁺ custom-written codes. The ReactingFOAM uses PISO and Simple coupled algorithm method to solve the governing equations. Results indicated that the emission of NO₂ is influenced, considerably by the presence of platinum near the lean, stoichiometric, and rich flame. It is also found that the presence of rhodium at the vicinity of the counterflow flame leads to a decrease in the CO formation for the flame with equivalence ratio of 0.7, 1, and 1.3 by 63, 18, and about 0%, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Unsteady counterflow flame
• ReactingFOAM solver
• platinum/rhodium catalytic combustion
• plus-shaped chamber

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by computational resources provided by the Australian Government through University of New South Wales under the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Additional information

Funding

This research received no external funding.