Effect of Syngas Fuel Compositions on the Occurrence of Instability of Laminar Diffusion Flame

The paper presents a numerical investigation of the critical roles played by the chemical compositions of syngas on laminar diffusion flame instabilities. Three different flame phenomena – stable, flickering and tip-cutting – are formulated by varying the syngas fuel rate from 0.2 to 1.4 SLPM. Following the satisfactory validation of numerical results with Darabkhani et al. [1], the study explored the consequence of each species (H₂, CO, CH₄, CO₂, N₂) in the syngas composition. It is found that low H₂:CO has a higher level of instability, which however does not rise any further when the ratio is less than 1. Interestingly, CO encourages the heat generation with less fluctuation while H₂ plays another significant role in the increase of flame temperature and its fluctuation. Diluting CH₄ into syngas further increases the instability level as well as the fluctuation of heat generation significantly. However, an opposite effect is found from the same action with either CO₂ or N₂. Finally, considering the heat generation and flame stability, the highest performance is obtained from 25%H²+75%CO (81 W), followed by EQ+20%CO₂, and EQ+20%N₂ (78 W).