Reduction of light hydrocarbon combustion mechanisms and speciation study of industrial flares through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods

Industrial ethylene flares are considered to be a probable major source of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) such as formaldehyde. Due to the difficulty and cost of field measurements, currently on-line monitoring is not practical and other methods must be employed. Current methodologies for calculating speciated and total VOC emissions from flaring activities generally apply a simple mass reduction to the VOC species sent to the flare that does not consider the production of incomplete combustion or other intermediates. There arises a need of a speciation study for the inspection of these flares for their emissions. However, most of the detailed kinetic mechanisms for the speciation study of flaring events are too complex, and consist of large numbers of reactions and species, and also are computationally expensive. Thus a reduced mechanism will be desirable for improving computational efficiency. In this dissertation, a 50-species reduced mechanism for simulating ethylene flaring, namely LU1.0, is presented. Then, a 50-species mechanism for C 1-C3 hydrocarbons was developed through exhaustive search. These two algorithms were developed by reducing a detailed mechanism of 93 species and 600 reactions. The reduced mechanisms were validated successfully against literature results of various key performance indicators: laminar flame speeds, adiabatic flame temperature, ignition delay tests and burner stabilized flame. It is demonstrated that simulation results using this reduced mechanism are in good agreement with reported experimental results.;This dissertation also presents a novel Run Time Combustion Zoning (RTCZ) technique based on the working principle of Eddy Dissipation Concept (EDC) for combustion modeling. This technique selectively chooses cells in which the full reaction mechanism needs to be solved. The selection criterion is based on the concept of differentiating between combustion and the non-combustion zone. With this approach, considerable reduction in computational load and stability of the solution was observed and even the number of iterations required to achieve a stable solution was significantly reduced.