Numerical Simulations of Turbulent Mixing and Autoignition of Hydrogen Fuel at Reheat Combustor Operating Conditions

Turbulent mixing and autoignition of H₂-rich fuels at relevant reheat combustor operating conditions are investigated in the present numerical study. The flow configuration under consideration is a fuel jet perpendicularly injected into a crossflow of hot flue gas (T > 1000K, p = 15bar). Based on the results of the experimental study for the same flow configuration and operating conditions two different fuel blends are chosen for the numerical simulations. The first fuel blend is a H₂/natural gas/N₂ mixture at which no autoignition events were observed in the experiments. The second fuel blend is a H₂/N₂ mixture at which autoignition in the mixing section occurred. First, the non-reacting flow simulations are performed for the H₂/natural gas/N₂ mixture in order to compare the accuracy of different turbulence modeling methods. Here the steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) as well as the unsteady scale-adaptive simulation (SAS) turbulence modeling methods are applied. The velocity fields obtained in both simulations are directly validated against experimental data. The SAS method shows better agreement with the experimental results. In the second part of the present work the autoignition of the H₂/N₂ mixture is numerically studied using the 9-species 21-steps reaction mechanism of O’Conaire et al. [1]. As in the reference experiments, autoignition can be observed in the simulations. Influences of the turbulence modeling as well as of the hot flue gas temperature are investigated. The onset and the propagation of the ignition kernels are studied based on the SAS modeling results. The obtained numerical results are discussed and compared with data from experimental autoignition studies.