Methane Pyrolysis: literature survey and comparisons of available data for use in numerical simulations

Guillaume Fau (1) , Nicolas Gascoin (2) , Philippe Gillard (1) , Johan Steelant (3)

1 PRISME - Laboratoire Pluridisciplinaire de Recherche en Ingénierie des Systèmes, Mécanique et Energétique
2 Univ. Orléans, PRISME, CE
3 ESA - Agence Spatiale Européenne = European Space Agency

Methane pyrolysis has been investigated in the open literature for a number of applications (improvement of fuel cracking, production of hydrogen, aeronautics and space use for cooling). This implies a large panel of experimental conditions and the development of numerous kinetic schemes, all validated for different test ranges. This last decade, a renew of interest is emerging according to the possibility of using methane as jet fuel for hypersonic applications. In this framework, it is required to determine the ability of the existing kinetic schemes to reproduce the chemical behaviour of the fuel during its pyrolysis (T > 1500 K and P > 1 MPa) in order to use these mechanisms in Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations. Thus, a balance must be found between the accuracy of the predictions and the computations time (linked to the mechanism size). Reviewing a large panel of the experimental and numerical works and then comparing the existing schemes with available data is proposed in this work to estimate their potential (considering, if possible, the maximal stressing conditions). After a first selection, ten mechanisms are quantitatively compared regarding three important species: methane, which reflects the pyrolysis rate; hydrogen, linked to the propulsion efficiency and acetylene which is involved in the coke formation (unwanted effect). The computation time has been also determined and it serves as an additional selection criteria. One model seems to emerge regarding its accuracy and its size. It results in predictions with disagreement lower than 30 % compared to the reference data and in calculation time lower than 1 s for a simulated time of 10 s in 0- D configuration.

Domaines: Chimie analytique

Guillaume Fau, Nicolas Gascoin, Philippe Gillard, Johan Steelant. Methane Pyrolysis: literature survey and comparisons of available data for use in numerical simulations. 49th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference, Jul 2013, San Jose, CA, United States. pp.3747, ⟨10.2514/6.2013-3747⟩. ⟨hal-00868606⟩