Experimental investigation and simulation of ignition of fuel-air clouds with fuel mixtures of hydrogen and hydrogen-carrying fuels

Abstract

Hydrogen is playing an increasingly important role as the world moves to a low-carbon energy system, but combustion properties of this gas are very different from other hydrogen-carrying fuels that can lead to difficulties for storage, transportation and usage. To check out minimum ignition energy of hydrogen and other hydrogen-carrying mixtures an ignition setup including 20-liter combustion vessel was built and tested. By switching capacitors with different capacitance in electrical circuit, it was possible to affect system and change value of spark energy. If spark energy was high enough, occurred explosion was observed, and high-speed visualization pictures were taken by Kirana camera. Experimental data was detected by oscillographs and plotted in Python. Explosion happened with minimum ignition energy much higher than it was postulated by previous studies. The following recommendation on work are given. In addition, one-dimensional pre-mixed flame simulation was implemented based on the Cantera python library to predict laminar flame velocity and temperature for hydrogen-air and hydrogen-carrying fuel-air mixtures.