A reduced mechanism for ethylene/methane mixtures with excessive NO enrichment

A detailed mechanism for methane–ethylene mixtures enriched with excessive amount of NO was systematically reduced for efficient numerical simulations of flames in arc-heated co-flowing air. Methane and ethylene were selected as the surrogate fuel in the present study due to their drastically different features of ignition and extinction properties and flame propagation speeds, such that the mixtures of them may be utilized to mimic practical hydrocarbon fuels with various kinetic properties in experiments. The recently released USC Mech-II for C1–C4 was grafted with the NOx sub-mechanism in GRI-Mech 3.0 with updated reaction parameters for prompt NO formation. The resulting detailed mechanism with 129 species and 900 reactions was first validated against experiments involving NOx enrichment and reasonably good agreements were observed. The detailed mechanism was then employed as the starting mechanism for the reduction. A skeletal mechanism with 44 species and 269 reactions was derived using the methods of directed relation graph (DRG) and DRG-aided sensitivity analysis (DRGASA); a 39-species reduced mechanism with 35 semi-global reaction steps was further obtained using the linearized quasi steady state approximations (LQSSA). Five species related to prompt NO were retained in the reduced mechanism because of their significant impacts on the fuel oxidation. The reduced mechanism closely agrees with the detailed mechanism for ignition and extinction of homogenous mixtures, as well as selected 1-D flames over a wide range of parameters with NO concentrations between 0% and 3%. The observed worst-case relative error of the reduction is approximately 20%. The reduced mechanism was further validated with experiments involving excessive NOx enrichment.