Numerical Study of the Effects of Nanoparticles on Fuel Diffusion Combustion

Abstract

The work investigates diffusion combustion of nanofuel made from the mixture of the base fuel and Al2O3 nanoparticles in a two-dimensional combustor with stationary horizontal walls. The numerical study was carried out by solving the problem governing equations including the continuity, momentum, energy and species concentration equations formulated for two-dimensional unsteady-state laminar convection using the finite volume method. The fully implicit scheme was used for the discretization in time; while upwind differencing and central differencing were used to discretize the convective and diffusive terms respectively. The results show that the values of the temperature and fuel concentration throughout the domain were higher during combustion of nanofuel than that of the base fuel only. Specifically, for flow streams at Re = 100, the addition of nanoparticles of volume fraction, π = 0.05, enhanced the outlet average temperature of the combustor by 13% over that of ordinary fuel. Also, the wall temperature at steady state for nanofuel combustion is 7.4742 compared with 6.5897 for the base fuel. The high concentration of nanofuel is an indication of incomplete combustion which implies that more heat and higher temperature can be generated by increasing the flow stream of air.