Exhaust gas recirculation in porous burners for the target application zero emission steam engines

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Exhaust gas recirculation in porous burners for the target application zero emission steam engines

Mössbauer, S. / Grüber, W. / Trimis, D.

For future propulsion systems, the reduction of emissions is an important issue. Consequently, a number of diverse endeavors are presently being undertaken to develop near-zero emission vehicles. One possible way of realizing such a Zero Emission Engine (ZEE) is a novel steam engine. In order to meet the zero emission requirement, this engine uses porous medium burners as the main heat source. In general, porous burners show many advantages, e.g. high compactness, great power-turndown ratio and very low emissions. However, efforts have to be made mainly to further decrease the NOx emissions of the porous burner to approach a real ZEE. Therefore, porous medium combustion has been combined with Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR), which has been used for NOx-reduction in conventional power trains for many years. This paper presents detailed experimental and numerical investigations about the application of EGR to porous medium burners. The results demonstrate that EGR allows the NOx emissions of porous burners to be reduced by 50 % without negatively affecting the overall performance or the emissions of CO and unburnt CH4. Independent of the thermal power, NOx emissions clearly below 20 mg/kWh could be achieved with all other emissions also being below 20 mg/kWh. The present paper also describes very briefly the fundamentals of porous medium combustion, EGR, and the influence of the recirculated exhaust on NOx-, CO-, and unburnt CH4-emissions.