Theoretical Investigation of Autoignition of Combustible Gas Mixtures in Rapid Compression Machines

In any theoretical investigation of ignition processes in natural gas reciprocating engines, physical and chemical mechanisms must be adequately modeled and validated in an independent manner. The Rapid Compression Machine (RCM) has been used in the past as a tool to validate both autoignition models as well as turbulent mixing effects. In this study, two experimental cases were examined. In the first experimental case, the experimental measurements of Lee and Hochgreb (1998a) were chosen to validate the simulation results. In their experiments, hydrogen/oxygen/argon mixtures were used as reactants. In the simulations, a reduced chemical kinetic mechanism consisting of 10 species and 19 elementary reactions coupled to a CFD software, Fluent 6, was used to simulate the autoignition. The ignition delay from the simulation agreed very well with that from the experimental data of Lee and Hochgreb, (1998b). In the second case, experimental data derived from an RCM with two opposed, pneumatically driven pistons (Brett et al., 2001) were used to study the autoignition of methane/oxygen/argon mixtures. The reduced chemical kinetic mechanism DRM22, derived from the GRI-Mech reaction scheme coupled to Fluent 6, was applied in the simulations. The DRM22 scheme included 22 species and 104 reactions. When methane/oxygen/argon mixture were simulated for the RCM, the ignition delay deviated about 15% from the experimental results. The simulation approaches as well as the validation results are discussed in detail in this paper. The paper also discusses an evaluation of reduced reaction models available in the literature for subsequent Fluent modeling.