A study on combustion characteristics of superadiabatic combustor in porous media

Because of the energy resource exhaustion, the aggravating environmental air pollution, the smoke phenomena and so on, the recent trends and targets in designing combustor are reduction of pollutant emissions and improvement of combustor efficiency. Therefore many combustion methods and emission control technologies have been proposed by many researchers through numerical and experimental analyses, One of the most available and effective combustion methods is the excess enthalpy combustion, so called, the superadiabatic combustion. In this study, the superadiabatic combustion with the reciprocating flow in a porous media has been investigated with the variation of equivalence ratio, flow velocity and reciprocating cycle time. In this system, the flow direction is reversed regularly by the solenoid valves. The results of this study show that the maximum gas temperature is remarkably higher than the theoretical adiabatic flame temperature and the emission characteristic is very excellent. The analyses reveal several attractive characteristics of the flame and the proposed idea is promising to burn mixtures of low heat content in a reciprocating type combustor. This combustor can be applied to the elimination of unburned compound, with more intensive and continuous study.