Evaluation of Chemical Kinetic Mechanisms for Methane Combustion: A Review from a CFD Perspective

Methane is an important fuel for gas turbine and gas engine combustion, and the most common fuel in fundamental combustion studies. As Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling of combustion becomes increasingly important, so do chemical kinetic mechanisms for methane combustion. Kinetic mechanisms of different complexity exist, and the aim of this study is to review commonly used detailed, reduced, and global mechanisms of importance for CFD of methane combustion. In this review, procedures of relevance to model development are outlined. Simulations of zero and one-dimensional configurations have been performed over a wide range of conditions, including addition of H2, CO2 and H2O, and the results are used in a final recommendation about the use of the different mechanisms. The aim of this review is to put focus on the importance of an informed choice of kinetic mechanism to obtain accurate results at a reasonable computational cost. It is shown that for flame simulations, a reduced mechanism with only 42 irreversible reactions gives excellent agreement with experimental data, using only 5% of the computational time as compared to the widely used GRI-Mech 3.0. The reduced mechanisms are highly suitable for flame simulations, while for ignition they tend to react too slow, giving longer than expected ignition delay time. For combustible mixtures with addition of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, or water, the detailed as well as reduced mechanisms generally show as good performance as for the corresponding simulations of pure methane/air mixtures.