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The effect of ammonia on soot formation in ethylene diffusion flames

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Abstract

This paper originally investigates the effect of NH3 dilution on soot formation when NH3 is gradually added into the fuel stream in an ethylene laminar diffusion flame stabilized on a Santoro burner. The variations of flame diameter and two flame heights, i.e., mixture-strength flame height and visible flame height are carefully documented and analyzed. Moreover, local soot volume fraction (SVF) and soot temperature fields are simultaneously measured by compact-modulated absorption and emission technique, and the corresponding measurement random errors are also provided by the error propagation calculations for the first time. All the reported measurement random errors of SVF and soot temperature fields are estimated within the range of ±0.07–±0.08 ppm and ±40–±91 K, respectively. As an original database, the concomitantly measured SVF and soot temperature distributions are provided as high-fidelity datasets for refining soot formation model that is overrode by NH3. In addition, the flame cross-section average SVF Fsoot(z) is calculated for every NH3 diluted flame, and the relative contributions of NH3 dilution and chemical effect are quantitatively assessed in terms of \({F_{\max }} - {X_{{\rm{N}}{{\rm{H}}_3}}}\) plotting. It is found that when \({X_{{\rm{N}}{{\rm{H}}_3}}} < 30\% \), the chemical effect of ammonia is about twice that of the dilution effect. While \({X_{{\rm{N}}{{\rm{H}}_3}}} > 30\% \), the chemical effect and dilution effect of ammonia are gradually equal. Eventually, through modeling of the soot formation rate V in the flames, the relative contributions of chemical effect, dilution effect and thermal effect of NH3 are further novelty discriminated within the \({X_{{\rm{N}}{{\rm{H}}_3}}}\) from 0 to 46% and it is shown that NH3 chemical effect plays the dominate role in soot suppression, then the dilution effect and the thermal one at the least.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Engines, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    QianLong Wang, ZhiWen Yan, ChaoMin Li, YanQing Cui, MingSheng Wen, HaiFeng Liu & MingFa Yao

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Correspondence to QianLong Wang.

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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52130605).

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Wang, Q., Yan, Z., Li, C. et al. The effect of ammonia on soot formation in ethylene diffusion flames. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 66, 3422–3438 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-023-2467-7

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