Minimum Ignition Energy of Methanol-Air Mixtures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical method to compute the minimum ignition energy of methanol-air mixtures using detailed and reduced chemical models, validated against experimental data.

Contribution

It presents a novel computational approach for ignition energy prediction that balances accuracy and efficiency through chemistry reduction techniques.

Findings

The method achieves reasonable agreement with experimental measurements.

Reduced chemistry models provide accurate predictions with less computational effort.

The approach demonstrates robustness across different chemical descriptions.

Abstract

A method for computing minimum ignition energies for gaseous fuel mixtures with detailed and reduced chemistry, by numerical integration of time-dependent conservation equations in a spherically symmetrical configuration, is presented and discussed, testing its general characteristics and accuracy. The method is applied to methanol-air mixtures described by a 38-step Arrhenius chemistry description and by an 8-step chemistry description based on steady-state approximations for reaction intermediaries. Comparisons of predictions with results of available experimental measurements produced reasonable agreements and supported both the robustness of the computational method and the usefulness of the 8-step reduction in achieving accurate predictions.