AE 202 Fuels and Combustion

Part 1 Introduction to Combustion

 Fire raised man above the animals Civilisation would be impossible without the mastery of laws of combustion. Levels of combustion usage:
1. Heating 2. Cooking 3. Metal manufacturing 4. Heat Engines 5. Emission Control

4-stroke

2-stroke

What is combustion?

What is combustion?
Combustion is the conversion of a substance called a fuel into chemical compounds known as products of combustion by combination with an oxidizer. The combustion process is an exothermic chemical reaction, i.e., a reaction that releases energy as it occurs.

What is combustion?
Combustion may be represented symbolically by:

Fuel + Oxidizer

Products of combustion + Energy

Either the chemical energy released is transferred to the surroundings as it is produced, or it remains in the combustion products in the form of elevated internal energy (temperature), or some combination thereof.

Types of Flames
The two classes of flames, (a) premixed and (b) nonpremixed (diffusion) are related to the state of mixedness of reactants. Spark Ignition flames is premixed. A candle burning is diffusion. (Reaction occurs only at the interface between the fuel and oxidizer). Turbulent non-premixed flames, the fuel and oxidizer is mixed by violent flow regime.

 Since fuel and air are initially separated, the nature of combustion is very different from premixed combustion.
combustion will always be on the most favourable place, i.e.stoichiometric conditions. this will lead to very high temperatures

Flame Speed

5 burning (flame speed < 1 m/s) 4 deflagration (flame speed < 100 m/s) 3 explosion (flame speed < 400 m/s) 2 partial detonation (flame speed < 1000 m/s) 1 full detonation (flame speed > 1000 m/s)

Fuel
Fuels are evaluated, in part, based on the amount of energy or heat that they release per unit mass or per mole during combustion of the fuel. Such a quantity is known as the fuels heat of reaction or heating value.

Appendix A-27

Oxidizer
In combustion processes the oxidizer is usually air but could be pure oxygen, an oxygen mixture, or a substance involving some other oxidizing element such as fluorine, clorine. Here we will limit our attention to combustion of a fuel with air or pure oxygen.

Oxygen is free.

Oxidizer
Air by mole or volume fractions is
78.1 % Nitrogen 0.9 % Argon 20.9 % Oxygen

For every 1 mole of O2, you intake 3.76 mole of N2. Treat Argon as Nitrogen

Gas Vapor Mixtures

Gas Vapor Mixtures

Gas-Vapor Mixtures

Gas-Vapor Mixtures

Mass and Mole Fractions

The amount of a substance present in a sample may be indicated by its mass or by the number of moles of the substance. A mole is defined as the mass of a substance equal to its molecular mass or molecular weight. Avagadro Number = 6.0221710^23 particle/mole

Mass and Mole Fractions

Mass and Mole Fractions

Define the mass fraction, of a component i, mfi, as the ratio of the mass of the component, mi, to the mass of the mixture, m: It is evident that the sum of the mass fractions of all the components must be 1. Thus

Analogous to the mass fraction, we define the mole fraction of component i, xi, as the ratio of the number of moles of i, ni, to the total number of moles in the mixture, n:

Mass and Mole Fractions

Mass and Mole Fractions