EXPERIMENTAL DETERMINATION OF LAMINAR BURNING VELOCITY OF BIOGAS AT PRESSURES UP TO 5 BAR

This paper presents a very detailed description of a new cylindrical constant volume combustion chamber designed for laminar burning velocity determination of gaseous mixtures at ambient temperature and initial pressure up to 6 bar. The experimental setup, the experimental procedure and the determination of the range of flame radius for laminar burning determination are all described in details. The laminar burning velocity of twelve synthetic biogas mixtures has been studied. Initial pressure varying between 1 and 5 bar, equivalence ratios, f, between 0.7 and 1.1 and percentage dilution, with a mixture of CO2 and N2, between 35 and 55% have been considered. Five experiments were run for each mixture providing a maximum percentage standard deviation of 8.11%. However, for two third of the mixtures this value is lower than 3.55%. A comparison with simulation using PREMIX for both GRI-Mech 3.0 and San Diego mechanisms has provided closer agreement for mixtures with equivalence ratio closer to stoichiometry whereas for f = 0.7 the deviation is larger than 15% for all pressures. Mixtures with lower equivalence ratio, higher dilution percentage and higher initial pressure presents the lower values of laminar burning velocity.