| A laboratory-scale Controlled Profile Reactor (CPR) was designed and fabricated for the purpose of performing experimental combustion studies under specified and highly controlled conditions. The reactor incorporates wall heating, computerized data acquisition and control, and adequate flame accessibility.; Natural gas combustion tests were performed using the CPR to collect a set of gaseous combustion data useful for evaluation of the comprehensive combustion model PCGC-2. To perform an evaluation of the model combustion measurements of gas velocities, temperatures, and species concentrations were made in the reactor with a 150 kW natural gas flame with an equivalence ratio of 1.05 and a secondary-air swirl number of 1.5. Combustion measurements of velocities and major species concentrations show generally good agreement with predicted values. Gas temperature measurements closely match predictions in the recovery region but fail to show a predicted high temperature annular region. This discrepancy may be attributed to the code's present inability to account for soot formation (and therefore soot radiation), during gas combustion. This study provides an evaluation of a comprehensive combustion model which can be useful as a design tool of applied combustion and reaction systems and provide information concerning system performance as combustion parameters are varied. |
