Plasma assisted combustion of methane-air mixtures: Validation and reduction

For several years now plasma assisted combustion has been the subject of intense research due to stabilization effects a can have on flames. Particularly, experiments shown promising impact Nanosecond Repetitively Pulsed discharges while not exceeding an energy consumption few percent flame power. In this work, incremental methodology with step-by-step approach used build single mechanism upon which is added using GRI 3.0 and Konnov v0.6. The focuses three key aspects combustion: fast gas heating, slow heating radical production. Selected focusing one or more these allow validate in large ranges temperature (300-1500 K) pressure (0.1-1 bar) air, methane-air argon diluted mixtures glow spark discharges. These include ignition case delay time well captured by mechanism. Slow modeled vibrational relaxation model validated against detailed description. Discussions ambiguous rates for critical reactions excited nitrogen quenching are made light their results chosen experiments. Finally, resulting 100-species 3.0-based 264-species v0.6-based mechanisms reduced make them suitable multi-dimensional simulations. DRGEP reduction method, based canonical cases, applied allowing reduce number species factor larger than two. GRI-3.0 mechanism, contains 47 429 reactions. Hence significant performance gained, opening way simulations combustion.