The importance of mixture preparation for industrial heat and power gas engines

The main task of a gas mixer is to mix the fuel (gas) with air in such a way that in the gas engine optimal combustion takes place. A high efficiency of the whole combustion process and low emissions are the decisive optimization parameters. An industrial gas engine operates mostly with a lean air-gas combustion mixture with an air excess coefficient ratio of → λ=1.6. Most often heat and power industrial gas engines operate with biogas. The biogas is produced by anaerobic digestion, where biodegradable materials in the absence of oxygen are fermented. That is why the biogas fuel consists mostly of methane → CH4 (up to 70 [%]), carbon dioxide → CO2 and traces of other contaminant gases. It is well known, that the performance of industrial gas engines strongly depends on the quality of air and fuel mixing and therefore homogeneity of the mixture. Improper air-gas mixture can lead to unstable operation of the entire gas engine and excessive emissions beyond the applicable environmental standards. Therefore, in this article numerical investigations were performed using the open source computational fluid dynamics software OpenFOAM to show the importance of mixture preparation for industrial heat and power gas engines by describing in detail the mixing behaviour in a Venturi gas mixer model.

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Opracowanie rekordu w ramach umowy 509/P-DUN/2018 ze środków MNiSW przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę (2018).