Radiative heat transfer in high-pressure laminar hydrogen-Air diffusion flames using spherical harmonics and k-distributions

Radiative heat transfer is studied numerically for highpressure laminar H2-Air jet diffusion flames, with pressure ranging from 1 to 30 bar. Water vapor is assumed to be the only radiatively participating species. A full spectrum k-distribution spectral model is used. Narrowband k-distributions of water vapor are calculated and databased from the HITEMP 2010 database, which claims to retain accuracy up to 4000K. The full-spectrum k-distributions are assembled from their narrowband counterparts to yield high accuracy with little additional computational cost. The radiative transfer equation (RTE) is solved using various spherical harmonics methods, such as P1, simplified P3 (SP3) and simplified P5 (SP5). The resulting partial differential equations as well as other transport equations in the laminar diffusion flames are discretized with the finite-volume method in OpenFOAM. Differential diffusion effects which are important in laminar hydrogen flames are also included in the scalar transport equations. It was found that peak flame temperature becomes less sensitive to radiation at higher pressure, and that radiation causes cooling in the downstream region. Differences between the three spherical harmonics RTE solver were found negligible below 5 bar.