A NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF LAMINAR FLAME SPEED FOR PRE-MIXED IRAQI LPG/AIR MIXTURE IN A HORIZONTAL CYLINDRICAL COMBUSTION CHAMBER
Author(s):
Hamza M Mjbel†*, Samer M Abdulhaleem†, Haroun A K Shahad†
Affiliation(s):
University of Babylon / College of the Engineering / Department of Mechanical Engineering
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
In the present work, a numerical and an experiential study is performed to obtain the laminar flame speed for premixed Iraqi LPG-air mixture at different equivalent ratios ranging from 0.6 to 1.4 in a horizontal cylindrical combustion chamber. A horizontal Pyrex cylindrical with dimension (1300 mm) length with (180mm) diameter is used as combustion chamber. The entrance of fuel/air mixture and the ignition source are located at one end of the cylinder while the other end is left open. A high-speed camera is used to record the flame propagation through the cylinder. These videos are then analyzed using Tracker program to obtain the laminar flame propagation speed. Also the Chemkin USC mech 2.0 is used to predict numerically the flame speed. Both experimental and numerical results show that the flame speed increases with equivalence ratio and reaches its maximum value at stoichiometric ratio and decreases as the mixture becomes richer. The study also includes a numerical analysis of the effect of propane/butane ratio on the flame speed. The result shows that high propane ratio enhances flame speed.