A Numerical Study on the Reactivity of Biogas/Reformed-Gas/Air and Methane/Reformed-Gas/Air Mixtures at Gas Turbine Relevant Conditions

This study investigates the increase in methane and biogas flame reactivity enabled by the addition of syngas produced through fuel reforming. To isolate thermodynamic and chemical effects on the reactivity of the mixture, the burner simulations are performed with a constant adiabatic flame temperature of 1800 K. Compositions and temperatures are calculated with the chemical equilibrium solver of CANTERA^® and the reactivity of the mixture is quantified using the adiabatic, freely-propagating premixed flame, and perfectly-stirred reactors of the CHEMKIN-Pro^® software package. The results show that the produced syngas has a content of up to 30 % H₂ with a temperature up to 950 K. When added to the fuel, it increases the laminar flame speed while maintaining a burning temperature of 1800 K. Even when cooled to 300 K, the laminar flame speed increases up to 30 % from the baseline of pure biogas. Hence, a system can be developed that controls and improves biogas flame stability under low reactivity conditions by varying the fraction of added syngas to the mixture. This motivates future experimental work on reforming technologies coupled with gas turbine exhausts to validate this numerical work.