1 Prediction of electron and ion concentrations in low-

pressure premixed acetylene and ethylene flames

J. Cancian , B.A.V. Bennett , M.B. Colket & M.D. Smooke (2013)

The focus of the present work is the numerical prediction of ion and electron
concentrations in combustion environments without applied electric fields.
Early work in this area:
o 1988 Brown & Eraslan who performed lean and stoichiometric 1D
premixed acetylene flames with an aim of predicting the behavior of
combustion-generated ions such as H3O+, HCO+, CH3+, CH2O+,
CH3O+, C2HO+, C2H3O+, C3H3+, C5H3+, C5H5+, C7H5+ this study
include chemiionisation by CH+O HCO+ + e-
o 1988 Brown & Eraslan who performed fuel-rich 1D premixed acetylene
flames. They included chemiionisation via the following reaction:

o Eraslan and Brown found that the dominant ion, C3H3+, was produced
from HCO+ by ion-molecule reactions
o Pedersen and Brown pursued similar numerical studies of 1D premixed
methane flames. Their approach included comparison of ionic species
concentration with experimental results in the absence of externally
applied electric fields, and they then exercised the model with applied
electric fields to investigate the phenomenon of saturation currents.
However, none of these approaches has brought together ambipolar diffusion
and plasma kinetics with an extended reaction mechanism that can allow
modelling of flames with and without applied electric fields.
In this paper, we develop a numerical model that incorporates ambipolar
diffusion and the calculation of plasma quantities to predict gas temperature,
species, and ion and electron concentrations in 1D laminar premixed flames
without applied electric fields.
The basis for this modelling effort is the existing CHEMKIN-based PREMIX code
from Grcar et al. ,which the author have modified to include the effects of
plasmas.
Flames under investigation (1D laminar flames studied in 1979) this flames
have an equivalent ratio between 1.27 and 2.31 and an inlet temperature of
295 K.
THEORY: the usual governing equations are conservation of mass, conservation
of energy, and a mass balance for each chemical species; the governing
equations are supplemented by an equation of state such as the ideal gas law.
However, when considering flows containing charged species and electrons and
hence plasmas, the electric field and the electron energy distribution function
(EEDF) must also be determined in order to include the effects of ambipolar
diffusion
 Using the EEDF, which is calculated using the BE solver of Hagelaar and
Pitchford embedded in ZDPlasKin [18], the plasma quantities that appear in the
governing equations can be determined as follows.
KINETIC SUBMODELS: The kinetic mechanism employed in this analysis contains
136 species (including the electronspecies, e, and 14 positively and 6 negatively
charged species) and 1010 reactions. It is composed of a base hydrocarbon
chemical mechanism with additional species and reactions for chemiionisation,
ion-molecule, dissociativerecombination, and plasma kinetics.