Combustion characterization of hybrid methane-hydrogen gas in domestic swirl stoves

Combustion of hybrid natural gas (methane) and hydrogen mixture in domestic swirl stoves has been characterized using hot-state experiments and numerical analysis. The detailed combustion mechanism of methane and hydrogen (GRI-Mech 3.0) has been simplified to obtain reduced number of chemical reactions involved (82 % reduction). The novel simplified combustion mechanism developed has been used to obtain combustion characteristics of hybrid methane-hydrogen mixture. The difference between the calculations from the detailed and the simplified mechanisms has been found to be <1 %. A numerical model, based on the simplified combustion model, is developed, rigorously tested and validated against hot-state tests. The results depict that the maximum difference in combustion zone’s average temperature is <13 %. The investigations have then been extended to hybrid methane-hydrogen mixtures with varying volume fraction of hydrogen. The results show that for a mixture containing 15 % hydrogen, the release of CO due to combustion reduces by 25 %, while the combustion zone’s average temperature reduces by 6.7 %. The numerical results and hot-state tests both confirm that the temperature remains stable when hybrid methane-hydrogen mixture is used in domestic swirl gas stoves, demonstrating its effectiveness in cooking processes.