Reduction of a detailed kinetic model for the ignition of natural gas mixtures at gas turbine conditions, 4th European Combustion Meeting

Natural gas is the primary fuel for industrial gas turbines. Although natural gas is mostly methane, its composi-tion varies. Detailed reaction mechanisms were developed to describe the ignition delays for mixtures with higher hydrocarbon content. The size of this detailed chemical kinetic model is too large to be used in CFD cal-culations. The aim of this study was to reduce the number of species and reactions to get a mechanism small enough to use in CFD calculations. A 39-species reduced mechanism was obtained which provides 3.9 % average deviation in the ignition delay times for lean and stoichiometric mixtures containing 10 % propane / 90 % meth-ane as fuel, in the pressure interval 10–40 atm and temperature range 876–1465 K