Natural Gas

As a tropical and highly mountainous country, Colombia has varying levels of atmospheric humidity across its regions. These humidity levels affect combustion parameters in premixed combustion systems such as laminar burning velocity, adiabatic flame temperature, and pollutant emissions. The greatest effect of water in the reaction zone is the reduction of NOx formation (at equilibrium) by up to 40% through the thermal mechanism for lean mixtures. The laminar burning velocity is reduced by up to 25% at an equivalence ratio of 0.5 and a molar moisture content of 3.5%.

In this paper, the part load operation of a dual fuel engine operating at 1500 m above sea level and its control using sonic flow meters for natural gas fuelling are presented. Dual fuel operation was established by retrofitting the intake system of a commercial Diesel engine with a port-injected gaseous fuels system, which was comprised by calibrated orifices working under sonic flow conditions. Natural gas mass flow rates throughout the orifices were estimated assuming the isentropic one-dimensional theory for perfect gases.

This research evaluates the effect of the equivalence ratio on knocking tendency in two Spark Ignition (SI) engines fueled with gaseous fuels. A Lister Petter TR2 Diesel engine(TR2) converted to SI was used to evaluate the equivalence ratio effect when the engine was fueled with fuel blends of biogas, natural gas, propane, and hydrogen. A Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine was used to study the effect of equivalence ratio on the Critical Compression Ratio (CCR) which is a metric to evaluate the knocking tendency of gaseous fuels.

This paper presents the experimental results of the addition (increasing thermal power) and substitution (constant thermal power) of a sub-bituminous pulverized coal in a natural gas flame in a laboratory-scale premixed burner. The analyzed variables include radiation intensity, temperature profile, and flame shape. It was found that with the addition of 15% and 30% coal (energy based) into the natural gas flame, the radiation intensity was increased by 37% and 65%, respectively.

A numerical study of flameless combustion with mixtures of methane and a sub-bituminous pulverized coal was carried out. The analyzed mixtures were 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% pulverized coal (energy based). The numerical study was performed using the geometry of a laboratory-scale furnace, which was originally designed to obtain the flameless combustion regime burning natural gas.

In this work, we evaluated the transient heating of a liquid using an in situ laboratory-scale combustion system, and the sensible and latent heat transfer efficiencies were determined through experimental evaluation of the heating of water volume and psychrometric parameters of combustion gases. Tests were performed using natural gas with a composition of 97% (by volume) of methane, and the liquid level was varied to study the effects on efficiency. Experimentation was carried out at atmospheric conditions of 298 K and 850 mbar with combustion gases at 446°C and equivalence ratio φ=0.83.