Turbulence-combustion interaction in H2/CO/air Bunsen flame

In last decades, the increasing care to environmental safeguard and costs in the hydrocarbon fuel supplying have prompted in the development of alternative fuels, namely hydrogen based fuels as syngas. Syngas consists in a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (CO) in different relative concentration, in some cases with small concentration of methane. The aim of this work is to address the dynamics of turbulent hydrogen/carbon-monoxide/air Bunsen flames by means of Direct Numerical Simulation. The main issue is to understand how the thermo-diffusive instabilities occurring in pure hydrogen/air flame [7] are influenced by the presence of the carbon-monoxide. It is well known that the thermo-diffusive instabilities are mainly induced by the high hydrogen diffusivity leading to local quenching and temperature peaks in the flame with consequent increase of pollutant formation (e.g. NOx). The presence of carbon monoxide in the fuel mixture has significant effects in flame dynamics where we observe a damping of the H2/air flame instabilities with less apparent quenching and high temperature peaks.