Ignition And Combustion Of Diluted Hydrogen Mixtures In A Flow Past An Array Of Catalytic Wires.

Abstract

In this paper we study the heat transfer and heterogeneous combustion problem
of the flow of a reacting mixture (in this case we address the case of hydrogen/oxygen
mixtures) flowing through an array of catalytic wires. The fluid velocity, vorticity, temperature
and species concentration of the reactants have been obtained for different flow
Reynolds numbers and for a Prandtl number of 0.72. The flow Reynolds number based on
the wire separation is assumed to be small but not larger than 40. We have obtained the
ignition temperature of the surface reactions as a function of the Peclet number for the
case of a wire radius of a = 0.02 cm. and a wire separation of l = 0.1 cm. The required
wire temperature increases with the Peclet number, begining with a critical Peclet number
of 0.056 corresponding to the auto-ignition condition (ignition at room temperature).