On developing a post processing approach to investigate PAH evolution for industrial applications

The use of detailed CFD simulations to predict PAH emission from industrial processes is impractical due to the very high computational overhead apart from the relatively high uncertainity in the input data. To address this, we propose a post processing approach to predict PAH evolution which uses the results of the CFD simulation of the major process gases based on a relevant skeletal mechanism as the input to PSR reactors (which is run on each cell in the domain) using detailed PAH chemistry. This work describes the underlying assumptions of the proposed approach and its implementation. The predictions from the proposed approach is compared with results of CFD simulation employing detailed PAH chemistry for the case of coflow burner burning a mixture of C2H2 and H2 at various flue gas recycling levels and fuel inlet velocities. The results show that proposed approach can predict the PAH emission, at a reasonable accuracy and a fraction of computational cost, using an appropriate value of the tuning parameter used in the definition of the residence time of the PSR model.