Combustion

Ammonia is a carbon-free fuel that can be produced from air and water with green electricity, and then burned with no carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast to hydrogen—the other carbon-free fuel—ammonia can be easily liquified at ambient temperatures.

We have shown that ammonia chemically suppresses soot formation when it is co-fired with hydrocarbon fuels. For more information, see Matthew’s poster from the 2019 AIChE meeting in Orlando  and Matthew’s paper in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.

A major challenge of ammonia combustion is that it burns poorly. For more information on our research to understand and ameliorate this problem, see Aurora’s presentation from the 13th US Combustion Meeting in College Station TX.

X-ray techniques are used extensively to study the properties of solid materials. We have been extending these techniques to measure properties of gas-phase reacting flows.
 

For more information, see Charles’ presentation from the 13th US Combustion Meeting in College Station TX and Colin’s paper in Combustion and Flame.

The ongoing transition from fossil fuels to sustainable fuels presents an opportunity to choose fuel compositions that will also reduce soot emissions. Lower soot emissions will improve local air quality—saving 100,000s of lives through reduced PM 2.5 exposure—and will amplify the climate change impacts due to lower black carbon in the atmosphere. Choosing low-soot fuels rationally requires knowledge of how sooting tendency depends on fuel structure. We have defined a new measure of sooting tendency, yield sooting index (YSI), and have measured it for over 600 hydrocarbons.

For more information on our research into the YSIs of poly(oxy)methylene ethers, see Charles’ presentation from the 2022 ACS Fall Meeting in Chicago.

For more information on our research into the YSIs of terpenes as components of sustainable aviation fuels, see Peter’s paper in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.

For more information on our research into the sooting tendencies of phenolic hydrocarbons that can be obtained from lignin, see Aurora’s presentation from the 2022 ACS Fall Meeting in Chicago.

For an example of using our measured YSIs to design new fuels, see Danielle’s open
access paper in Fuel.

Hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel that can be burned without carbon dioxide emissions. However, hydrogen flames are nearly invisible, which creates safety and operational issues. As part of a brand new project funded by the Gas Technology Institute (GTI) we are characterizing the visibility of hydrogen flames and studying various “colorants” that could be used to improve it.