Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

ScienceDirect
Energy Procedia 105 (2017) 1058 – 1062

The 8th International Conference on Applied Energy – ICAE2016

Effects of fuel composition on biogas combustion in premixed

laminar flames
Angelo Greco a, Daniel Mira b, Xi Jiang a, *
a
Engineering Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK
b
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

Fuel variability plays a major role in biogas combustion utilisation, where modelling and simulation can be used to
provide guidelines. The construction of a flamelet generated manifold (FGM) is an important step for the simulation of
complex turbulent flames. The FGM is made from premixed laminar flames and the limited literature on biogas
combustion has led to this study on the effects of the fuel composition on biogas combustion in a freely propagating
laminar premixed flame. The results have shown that methane concentration has a significant impact on the
combustion process. There was no major difference observed among fuel mixtures with a fixed CH4 volume
concentration of 50%, with CO2 varied from 40%, 49% to 50% and completed with either 10% of N2 or 1% H2. The
study can be further extended for numerical simulations under more realistic and practical conditions in order to
develop guidelines for industrial combustors.
© 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Selection and/or
Peer-review underpeer-review under
responsibility responsibility
of the of ICAEof the 8th International Conference on Applied Energy.
scientific committee
Keywords: Biogas; Combustion; Fuel composition; Numercal simulation.

1. Introduction

Renewable energy sources are playing an increasingly important role in world energy supply, which is facing an
unprecedented dilemma in meeting the growing energy demand with depleting natural resources. Biogas and bio-
syngas are the most important gaseous renewable energy related to biomass. Biogas is normally produced by the
anaerobic digestion or fermentation of biodegradable materials such as biomass, manure, sewage, municipal waste,
green waste, plant material, and agriculture crops. The renewable gaseous fuels such as biogas and bio-syngas (from
gasification of biomass) are not broadly used, despite their advantages, mainly because of their complex chemical
compositions [1, 2]. Biogas mainly consists of CH4 and CO2, with the presence of other minor constituents such as N2
and H2, where the percentages of these constituents can vary significantly. The variable fuel composition can cause
problems in the combustion of these fuels in practical systems. In fact, the fuel composition changes or the fuel
variability may lead to unpredictable combustion performances, combustion instability and hot spots which may
deteriorate and damage the combustion hardware.

Numerical modelling and simulation provide a means to understand the combustion of these renewable fuels, and
more importantly, to assist the development of guidelines for their use in practical combustion systems. However, the
large number of species to consider during the combustion process of the fuel mixture, coupled to the resolution of
mass and energy conservations in turbulent flows is still a challenge in terms of computational costs. The reduction of

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-1524-592439.

E-mail address: [email protected].

1876-6102 © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 8th International Conference on Applied Energy.
doi:10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.457
 Angelo Greco et al. / Energy Procedia 105 (2017) 1058 – 1062 1059

chemical processes is known to be a good approach for alleviating this problem. Among the chemical reduction
techniques, there are several methods that can be used, e.g. the computational singular perturbation (CSP) method [3]
and the intrinsic low-dimensional manifold (ILDM) method [4] where fast chemical processes are identified. The CSP
method is accurate but has a high computational cost for complex simulations. The ILDM method works well in high-
temperature regions of the flame but in colder region of the flame, convection and diffusion must be taken into account
[5]. In this optic, the flamelet generated manifold (FGM) developed by van Oijen and co-workers [5] may provide a
cost-effective means for modelling combustion chemistry. The FGM method is identical to ILDM at high temperature
regions and works better in colder flame regions. This method is based on the flamelet approaches, considering that a
multidimensional flame is a set as one-dimensional flames called flamelets. The FGM was developed for premixed
laminar flames with a filter applied to the turbulence. This model is only valid if the chemistry time-scale is smaller
than the turbulence one. The development of manifold for biogas or bio-syngas combustion chemistry requires a study
of one-dimensional premixed laminar flame at different fuel compositions. This paper will present the numerical
modelling and results of a freely propagating laminar flame in function of the initial biogas composition. The
hypotheses and models used for the simulations are presented first. Followed by the validation the open-source
software package in which the models are implemented. Finally, conclusions are drawn with future work proposed.

2. Method and validation

The problem to be solved is a premixed, freely propagating, laminar flat flame with no heat losses. A premixed
mixture of fuel and air is entering in the reaction zone, where the combustion is taking place. The governing equations
to be solved consist of the continuity, species conservation and energy conservation equations, given as follows.
wU (1)
 ’ ˜ Uu 0
wt
wYk (2)
 ’ ˜ U uYk ’ ˜ U Dk ’Yk  Z k
wt

w U c pT wT § Ns · (3)
wt
 ’ ˜ U c p uT ’ ˜ O’T  ZT  U ¦ c p,kYkVk ,i ¸¹
wxi ¨© k 1

In Eqs. (1)-(3), U , c p , T , O , u are the density, specific heat capacity, temperature of the mixture, thermal
conductivity and velocity vector of the fluid respectively, while Yk , Dk and Z k represent the mass fraction, transport
diffusion coefficient and production rate of the species k from 1 to Ns (total number of species) respectively.
Additionally, c p ,k and Vk ,i represent the specific heat and diffusion velocity of the species respectively. The problem
is considered as steady where the equations are solved by seating in the frame of the flame. In addition, the hypotheses
of a freely laminar propagation allow considering the problem as one-dimensional. The premixed fuel/air fluid mixture
is considered as perfect a gas with pressure assumed as constant and with a non-unity /HZLV QXPEHU /H  The
equations were solved on a one-GLPHQVLRQDO GRPDLQ VXEGLYLGHG LQ 1 LGHQWLFDO HOHPHQWV RI VL]H ǻ[ /1 The GRI-
Mech 3.0 chemistry mechanism is considered for describing the chemistry during the combustion of the gas and it
contains 53 species and 325 chemical reactions. Moreover, the diffusion coefficient of a species k in Eq. (2) is
described by a mixture averaged diffusion coefficient:
1  Yk (4)
Dkm Ns

¦X
jzk
j / Dk , j

In Eq. (4), X j designates the molar fraction of specie j.

In this study, simulations for studying the effects of the fuel composition on combustion in the case of a laminar
premixed flame were performed on the open-source package Cantera 2.2.1
(http://www.cantera.org/docs/sphinx/html/index.html, which is suite of object-oriented software tools for problems
involving chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and/or transport processes). The fuels considered in this study are
presented in Table 1. The package Cantera 2.2.1 is validated first by comparison to the commercial package PREMIX
from CHEMKIN (http://www.reactiondesign.com/products/chemkin/). A close agreement was obtained between both
packages in Fig 1 for BG4 at the equivalence ratio ࢥ=0.7, initial temperature T=298K and p=1 bar.
1060 Angelo Greco et al. / Energy Procedia 105 (2017) 1058 – 1062

Table 1. Computational cases for biogas fuel variability study

Biogas (Volume %) CH4 CO2 H2 N2

Case BG1 50 50 0 0
Case BG2 75 25 0 0
Case BG3 50 40 0 10
Case BG4 50 49 1 0
Case BG5 100 0 0 0

Fig. 1. Comparison between Cantera and PREMIX for a 1D planar premixed BG4/Air (O2 + 3.76 N2) flame at ࢥ=0.7, T=298K and p=1bar.

The next part is dedicated to comparisons of biogas with different fuel compositions in order to understand the
effects of fuel variability on the combustion process.

3. Results and discussions

The combustion behaviours of the fuel mixtures presented in Table 1 are compared to each other in the
configuration identical to the one used for the validation test at the equivalence ratio 0.7 and 1.1. These equivalence
ratios were chosen to study the effects of the chemical composition in both lean and rich sides. Fig 2 compared
combustion of the fuel mixtures in terms of adiabatic temperature, with close results between BG1, BG3 and BG4
despite their different initial chemical compositions. This observation is also made for the flame speed, as presented in
Fig. 3, where no major differences were observed between BG1, BG3 and BG4.The biogas mixtures BG1 and BG4 are
the closest to each other in terms of flame behaviour, due to the small difference in their initial chemical composition.
The small dilution by H2 in BG4 did not lead to major variation compared to BG1 at different equivalent ratios, on the
adiabatic temperature, flame speed and mass fraction of the species as shown also in Fig 3 and Fig 4. Besides, BG3
stayed close to the behaviour of BG1 and BG4, despite the higher dilution of N2. Cases BG2 and BG5 showed
different combustion behaviours due to the elevated CH4 concentrations in these two cases. The observation may be
quantitatively different in other configurations, such as a turbulent flow in a combustor or multi-dimensional
laminar/turbulent flames. However, the qualitative trend is not expected to change.
 Angelo Greco et al. / Energy Procedia 105 (2017) 1058 – 1062 1061

Fig. 2. Comparison the adiabatic temperature of the different biogas mixtures presented in Table 1.

Fig. 3. Comparison of the flame speed for the biogas presented in Table 1

Fig. 4. Mass fraction of CH4 at the composition described in Table 1.

1062 Angelo Greco et al. / Energy Procedia 105 (2017) 1058 – 1062

Fig. 5. Mass fraction of CO2 at the composition described in Table 1.

4. Conclusions and future work

The study has investigated the effects of fuel composition on biogas combustion, in a laminar one-dimensional
premixed flame. These results provide a basis for future development of flamelet generated manifold for turbulent
combustion of biogas mixtures. The close results observed for cases BG1, BG3 and BG4 indicates that CH4
concentration plays a major part in the combustion behaviours. Further studies are needed to investigate the flame
behaviours in more realistic configurations such as three-dimensional turbulence flames. Different combustion
configurations will be investigated as well as modelling of the combustion process [6]. Other topics that need further
investigations include the flame instability and pollutant emissions.

References

[1] Fischer M, Jiang X. An investigation of the chemical kinetics of biogas combustion. Fuel 2015;150:711-20.
[2] Barnwal A. Combustion properties of biologically sourced alternative fuels. Toronto: University of Toronto; 2012.
[3] Lam SH, Goussis DA. Conventional asymptotics and computational singular perturbation for simplified kinetics modelling. In: Smooke MD.
Reduced kinetic mechanisms and asymptotic approximations for methane-air flames, Berlin: Springer Verlag; 1991, p. 227–242.
[4] Maas U, Pope SB. Simplifying chemical kinetics: Intrinsic low-dimensional manifolds in composition space. Combust Flame 1992;88:239–
64.
[5] Oijen J. Flamelet-generated manifolds: development and application to premixed laminar flames. Eindhoven: Technical University of
Eindhoven; 2002.
[6] Fiorina B, Gicquel O, Vervisch L, Carpentier S, Darabiha N. Approximating the chemical structure of partially premixed and diffusion
counterflow flame using FPI flamelet tabulation. Combust Flame 2005;140:147–60.