Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Fuel Processing Technology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fuproc

Investigation of partially-premixed combustion in a household

cooker-top burner
. Bedii zdemir a,, Murat Kanta b
a
b

Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Gumussuyu 34437, Istanbul, Turkey
Fluid Dynamics Technologies, Arelik R&D Center, E5 Ankara Asfalti, Tuzla, 34950, Istanbul, Turkey

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 1 March 2016
Received in revised form 27 April 2016
Accepted 28 April 2016
Available online 5 June 2016
Keywords:
Cooker-top burners
Partially-premixed turbulent combustion
PDF methods
ILDM chemistry
PIV measurements

a b s t r a c t
The present paper provides an examination of the CH4/air ame in a self-aerated cooker-top burner currently in
production. The operating conditions, the design characteristics and their effects on the combustion were investigated by calculating velocity, turbulence, temperature and reactive scalars using a modied temperaturecomposition pdf method. The two-stream nature of the problem allowed the use of the non-premixed formulation in that the calculations were started from the premixing chamber wherein fuel and air inows were separated. The ingredients of the present study also included in-situ measurements of velocity with a PIV and the
visualization of temperature by a line-of-sight infrared light detection system. The study shows that the current
modelling of turbulent combustion is successful in predicting the location of the reaction zone as well as the
shape and the properties of the ame. The results reveal that the present burner seems to produce ames
which impinge only on the edges of the standard cooking vessel and lose the most of the available energy to
the surrounding ambient air. Hence, the current ame position does not only reduce the thermal efciency,
but also re-cycles a large amount of burned gases into the premixing chamber. This situation decreases the aeration efciency and eventually leads to an incomplete combustion and increased emissions of carbon monoxide.
However, the ue gas recirculation also reduces the combustion intensity and the peak ame temperatures so
that the thermal NO formation is expected to be inhibited.
2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Measures for promoting thermal efciency and reducing emissions
are the most common ways to tackle the problem of decreasing the environmental impacts of energy utilization devices. Among them, household burners are the major energy consuming appliances which are
responsible for a large portion of the total energy consumption and
greenhouse gas emissions worldwide [13]. Improper designs of these
burners are known to be accompanied with dangerous levels of pollutant emissions and excessive amount gas consumption due to inefcient
combustion. As far as the health-based standards are concerned [4,5], it
is recognized that the current cooking technologies are certainly not on
track and can cause potentially harmful levels of indoor-air pollution.
Especially when gas cooking appliances are used without an exhaust
hood, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) that they
emit can exacerbate various respiratory and other illnesses [6]. Since
the full potential of sustainable use of energy in buildings remains unexploited, most countries have adopted energy/health related legislations
to set the targets for improving energy efciency and reducing
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: bozdemir@itu.edu.tr (.B. zdemir), murat.kantas@arcelik.com
(M. Kanta).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fuproc.2016.04.039
0378-3820/ 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

emissions. Cooking is one of the most prevailing energy end-use in

households and, hence, chasing the targets in this segment is especially
important. The achievement of the near future targets, however, requires for a better understanding of the processes leading to inefciency
and pollutant emissions in the domestic cookers.
Although there are many technological offers [710], low-pressure,
self-aerated domestic cooker-top burners commonly utilize partiallypremixed ames, impinging at an angle on the bottom of a cooking vessel where high rates of heat transfer can be achieved. Despite their
widespread use, the processes which determine their performance are
not well understood. They are characterized by complex three dimensional turbulent ow and chemical reactions which affect the steadiness
of the burning. Hence, two processes seem most critical for the ame
stability issues such as lift, ashback and yellow-tipping; these are the
mixture preparation process and the delivery of the ames from the
ports.
The mixing in these burners occurs in two phases. The rst phase
starts when the fuel issues from an injector at the bottom of a small
premixing chamber as a vertical turbulent jet into the mouth of a contraction tube. While the jet accelerates in the contraction tube, it pulls
and entrains the air in the premixing chamber which is aerated from
the top of the cooking hob. The mixing intensies as the ow in the contraction tube impinges onto the burner cap and expands radially in the

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.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

region between the burner head and the cap. Its pressure increases at
the outskirts of the expansion region and becomes nearly stagnant
just before the entrance of the ports. The process up to the ports involves mixing without burning, which can be named as a cold
mixing or primary aeration. The second phase of the mixing occurs
outside the burner head where the fuel-rich thin jets are delivered
at a prescribed speed and angle from the ports circumferentially
positioned on the burner. The geometry of the port plays an important role in the secondary mixing process, and it is now well
established that the rectangular ames deliver higher and more
homogeneous heat compared to circular ames [11]. Therefore,
over the last decade, the ports are designed with rectangular
cross-sections of various aspect ratios. In these designs, the port
channels are used to shape the jet ows and incubate inherent instabilities which further enhance the induction of the hot air blended with the burned gases. The sizing of the channels is also crucially
important to set the velocity of the unburned mixture with respect
to the ame speed so that the ports can act as a ame trap. The
burning starts in the rich mixture well before the mixture composition reaches stoichiometric values. The secondary mixing process
occurs concurrently with the burning and, thus, can be named as
hot mixing. The reaction continues until the composition far from
the burner head eventually becomes very lean. It is known that by
varying the degree of aeration and ow topology, the locations
where the mixture is stoichiometric can change: As the mixing increases, the reaction zone with mixture fraction values very near
to stoichiometric expands to a larger region. As a result, the rate
of heat release becomes correlated with the turbulence through
the efciency and rapidity of the mixing.
In general, the cold and hot mixing processes depend not only on
the ports but also on the form and the sizing of other components, including injector, premixing chamber, contraction tube and burner
head and cap [12]. Improper designs of these components cause insufcient or excess aeration and make the burners prone to produce
rich or lean combustion, respectively. When the mixture is fuel-lean,
the combustion takes place in a very unstable manner with a wheezing sound and a trend to blow-off. On the other hand, as the mixtures
become rich, substantial CO can be produced and the burner
operates with a very low thermal efciency [13,14]. After the
premixing process inside the burner head, the delivery of the mixture into the space between the burner and the vessel appears to
be the next critically important process, in which the departure
angle of the jets from the ports determines whether the burner is
categorized as the radial- or vertical-burner. The radial-ow burners
are the most conventional type of the domestic cooker-tops in which
the heating occurs mainly during the ame impingement on the bottom surface of the vessel where the hot wall-jets move tangentially
away from the stagnation zone. The momentum and the angle of
the jets as well as the burner-to-vessel distance determine the size
of the contact area of the wall-jet and, thus, are directly related to
the thermal efciency [15]. When the vessel is located near the burner, the reactions continue over the bottom surface of the vessel and,
hence, the thermal efciency is expected to improve since the heat of
combustion is mostly transferred to the vessel than to the ambient
air. Hence, it is desirable to have an extended ame stretched to
cover at least half the radius of the cooking vessel, which requires
the ames slightly richer than stoichiometry reach the bottom surface. On the other hand, when the vessel is located too far away
from the burner, the size of the contact area decreases and so the
thermal efciency. Also, the ame cools as it moves farther away
from the ports, which leads to incomplete reactions and higher probability of shedding rich uid parcels with unburned hydrocarbons.
This effect was evidenced by Mishra [16] who showed that by doubling the impingement distance, the CO emission increases roughly
by 50%. With similar reasons, the ame quench on cold surfaces
like the vessel holders or grills may also result in an increased CO

emission. Decreasing the exit angle and the momentum of the fuel
jets obviously reduce the size of the contact area and lead to similar
deteriorations in the efciency and CO emission. These arguments
were supported by Mishra's results [16] in that increasing the Reynolds number three times brings about a rise in the CO emission by
roughly a factor of two. Another important parameter is the number
of jets, which determines the jet-to-jet spacing: Decreasing the number of jets has a favorable impact on the secondary mixing, but also
decreases the velocity and so the momentum of the mixture.
It is obvious that ow, turbulence and dynamics of chemical kinetics
play an important role in the combustion mode occurring in household
burners [17]. However, the number of studies dedicated to the cookertop burners is very low and most of them are experimental. Hence,
there is a room for the development of combustion models for use in domestic products to provide further understanding. The present study
proposes a numerical model and methodology for extracting more information on the turbulent ow and thermo-chemistry involved in
the cooker-top burners. It will also be used for developing new designs
at a lower cost without physical prototyping or expensive laboratory
testing. The present results are supported by the in-situ measurements
of the reacting ow.
2. Modelling of ow, chemistry and their interactions
For the present low-Mach number reacting gas ow, the Reynoldsaveraged NavierStokes (RANS) formulation of the conservation of
mass and momentum [18] can be given as,

u
~j

0;
x j

and


u




~iu
~j
ji T;ji

gi ;
x j
xi
x j

where () and () represent conventional- and Favre-averages, respectively. u denotes velocity, p pressure and gi gravitational accel~ j =xi u
~ i =x j 23

u
ul =xl ji where is the
eration.

ji

molecular viscosity. The Eqs. (1) and (2) are solved using a k- turbulence model with standard wall functions, where the turbulent stress
0 0
~ =x u
~ =x 2 u
~ =x 2
is dened by

ug
u u
T;ji

l ji

e2

~
kji with effective turbulence viscosity, T C k =~ and standard
model constant, C.
Similarly, the enthalpy transport can be expressed as,
!

u
~


~ jh
~ j u
~j
~ i u
~ i
2 u
~ u

p
u
~
uj

~ i
3 xi x j
x j
x j xi x j
x j

 ~
ns

T


hs Y_ s :
x j C p PrT;h x j s1

s
Enthalpy of the mixture, h, is dened as h ns =
1 Y s h s where
h s = h 0f , s + T 0 T C p , s (T ' )dT ' , h 0f , s is the formation enthalpy of the
species s at the reference temperature T 0. Cp is the constant pressure specic heat and is the thermal conductivity of the mixture.
PrT , h means the turbulent Prandtl number which is taken as 0.9.
Since the fuel injector and the premixing chamber are included
in the solution where fuel and air inlets are separated, the formalism of non-premixed combustion is used with the mixture fraction
as the conserved scalar. For that, the equations for the mean mixture fraction

u
~ j ~

x j
x j

"

T
Sc ScT;

~
x j

#
4

.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

f
02
and its variance, ,

scale. Depending on these four variables, number of points for the progress variables varied from 1 to 29.

2
3
! f
f2
2

u


~ j

T
4
5
ScT;~ x j
Sc~
x j
x j
v
v
0
12
!
f
2

T B C
2

~ g
2

:
@
A 2
~
ScT;~
Sc~
x j
k
v

3. Burner design, operating conditions and numerical

implementations

are solved, where a prime describes uctuation about the Favre

average.
The cooker-top burner under investigation was tuned to burn methane. For that, the CH4 air mechanism, which has been developed by
Warnatz (personal communication with J. Warnatz, 2005), is used: It includes 393 elementary reactions and 43 species. However, solving the
transport equations for all species involved massively increases the computations and, therefore, simplication of the chemical kinetics is necessary. The intrinsic low-dimensional manifolds (ILDM) approach [1921
and references therein] is used to reduce the degree of chemical kinetics
and the number of transport equations to be solved. Knowing that mass
fractions of CO2 and H2O (YCO2 and YH2O) are sufcient to describe the
compositional space for the atmospheric ames [22], the manifolds for
these two progress variables are computed at atmospheric pressure and
for temperatures ranging from 300 K to 3000 K with T = 50 K, ~ from
0 to 1 with ~ = 0.005, Y~ CO2 from 0 to 1 with Y~ CO2 = 0.005 and Y~ H2 O
from 0 to 1 with Y~ H O = 0.005. The transport equation for the progress
2

variables (mass fractions of CO2 and H2O), Y~ s , is expressed as,

u
~s
~ jY

x j
x j

"

T
ScY~ s ScT;Y~ s

#
~s


Y
Y_ s :
x j

In Eqs. (4)(6), Sc, Sc~ , ScY~ s , ScT,, ScT;~ and ScT;Y~ s are the laminar and
v

f
2
turbulent Schmidt numbers for ~, and Y~ s, respectively, and all are taken
as 0.7. In the current case, the turbulence is expected to be the prevalent
transport mechanism and, thus, the mass diffusivities are assumed to be
the same for all species with the Lewis number being unity.
For turbulence-chemistry interactions, the modied temperaturecomposition probability density function (pdf) approach developed by
zdemir [23] was used; the approach exploits the outputs of timevarying homogeneous reacting system (YCO2]hs , and YH2O]hs , ) to
resolve statistical dependence problem. The normalized progress
variables, used in averaging process, then become

Y
CO2

109

YCO2
Y H2 O


and YH2 O
YCO2 hs;
Y H2 O hs;

Hence, the methodology takes into consideration of local time scales

() dened by the balance of the turbulent convective transport perpendicular to the ame () and the diffusive ux tangent to the ame () as,
4 T !

U jet
C p

2 T
Db
U

where Ujet is the bulk jet velocity and Db is the typical diameter of the
burner. The width of the reaction zone is dened as = | st |. The
ame surface and ux directions are described by the gradient of mixture
fraction and unitary tangent vector which is dened by the reactive scalars. The details of the methodology can be found in [23]. Using this approach, the thermo-chemical database was built with a dimension of 61
f
2
points for T, 43 points for ~, 24 points for and 6 points for the time

The computational setup for the present study of turbulent combustion was based on the self-aerated radial-ow burner shown in Fig. 1a.
The cooker-top included an injector manufactured from brass, a
premixing chamber and burner head made of cast aluminum and a
burner cap formed from steel sheet. The methane with a lower
heating-value of 50.0 MJ/kg was supplied to the burner at a ow rate
of 0.29 m3/h and pressure 20 mbar. The fuel jet, injected from a nozzle
of diameter df = 1 mm, was self-aerated in the premixing chamber of
volume 78,359 mm3 and then delivered through the ports. There were
48 ports in the form of rectangular slots with 1.6 mm width: 32 of
them were the main slots with 4.1 mm height, 8 of them were the
medium-sized slots with 2.7 mm height and the remaining 8 were the
small slots with 0.71 mm height. The slots were oriented at an angle
of 15 to the horizontal and located on the outer ring of the burner
head of 83.5 mm diameter. An additional pilot ring slot with a total
area of 157 mm2 was designed to improve the uniformity of ame structure under the cooking vessel. The vessel, which was made of aluminum
of a diameter of 250 mm, was held on a cast-iron grill above the burner
and was containing 100 C water as the load. The water temperature
was monitored by a thermo-junction. The distance between the bottom
surface of the vessel and the mid-port location was H = 25 mm (see
Fig. 1b).
The Eqs. (1)(6) are solved by a variable density nite-volume method using a commercial code [24]. The numerical domain for the burner/
vessel arrangement is shown Fig. 1b. In order to provide proper streamline curvatures downstream of the injector, the fuel inlet boundary was
located at 3df upstream, which also ensured a fully-developed pipe ow
prevailing at the injector exit. A Dirichlet boundary condition [25] was
used at the inow where the mixture fraction variance and the mass fractions of the progress variables were set to zero. The mean mixture fraction
was unity and, except for axial velocity, other components were set to
zero. A Neumann boundary condition was applied for the scalars on the
outow boundaries and, for momentum, pressure exit boundary condition was applied with the surrounding atmospheric pressure varying
with the gravity in the vertical direction (x-direction). With the purpose
of minimizing the inuence of outow boundary, the width of the computational domain was extended up to 2.5Db in the radial and xdirections. The thermal boundary conditions at the walls of the burner
were dened as specied temperature set by using the measured values.
Since we don't expect a sooty ame consisting of the source particles to
promote radiative heat transfer, the mean volumetric heat loss was
neglected. With an anticipation of very steep velocity gradients, the
mesh resolution was increased near the burner, and this was especially
important for the present methane ame which had a very low stoichiometric mixture fraction (st =0.055). Hence, the solution domain in the
present case was split into 7.5 million hexahedral cells, where the Ogrid arrangement assured an adequate resolution in the recirculation region between the burner and the vessel. A central differencing scheme
[25] was used for the spatial discretization in order to preserve second
order accuracy. The solver was parallelized by domain decomposition
and the calculations were performed in a parallel environment with 40
processors. A residual tolerance of 105 was used in the solver setup,
which was accurate enough for the scalars computed.
4. Measurement and visualization techniques
4.1. Velocity measurements
A commercial Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system (DANTEC),
Fig. 2, was used for planar measurements of velocity. The seed particles

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.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

Fig. 1. a) Burner, and b) Block-structured mesh with the use of O-grid.

were illuminated by an Nd:YAG laser (New Wave Solo III) which delivered two pulses separated by 100 s, each with a power of 50 mJ and a
duration of 5 ns. The wavelength of 532 nm led to a thinner light sheet
without chromatic aberrations which resulted in an improved scattering from particles. A combination of a cylindrical lens (with a focal
length of 12.2 mm) and a spherical lens (with a focal length of
500 mm) was used to form the laser beam into a thin light sheet of
3.5 mm thickness and 32.7 mm width. This provided a sufcient intensity over a distance of 42.9 mm to properly image the particles. A highresolution CCD camera (HISENSE MK II) was used to obtain images with

light-sensitive pixels that convert light into charge. The depth of eld of
the receiving optics (MICRO NIKKOR) was kept less than 1 mm to avoid
image blur. The directional ambiguity was solved by separating the light
of the subsequent recordings onto different frames, which also allowed
the arrangement of the pulse separation and higher signal-to-noise
ratio in the correlation analyses. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) particles
with nominal sizes between 5 and 30 m were used to seed the surrounding air and the air in the premixing chamber. An average density
of 0.6 g/ml corresponded to a particle inertia small enough to ensure
good tracking of the uid motion. The two phase effect of particle

Fig. 2. Schematic of the PIV set-up.

.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

loading was minimized by keeping the particle concentration less or

equal to 5 p/mm2. The estimation of the peak error for the current velocity measurements was about 10%.
4.2. Infrared imaging
An infrared camera system (THERMOVISION A40M), Fig. 3, was used
for the visualization of the temperature eld. The camera observed the
reactive ow from a distance of 0.3 m within a 24-degree cone angle
with a resolution of 1.3 10 3 rad. Infrared lights, collected using a
telescopic lens system, were dropped on 76,800 responsive cells sensitive to long wave lights in the range of 7.5 to 13 m and formed 2 dimensional images which were then acquired as analogue signals at a
rate of 60 frames/s over an IEEE 1394 link. The measurement plane
had dimensions of 12 12 cm2 in the ow. The colors did not exactly
represent the perception by color vision of humans and, thus, the images were displayed in pseudo-colors, where the hot regions were colored white, intermediate temperatures red to yellow, and the coolest
regions black. So, only a rough scale is shown to relate colors to temperatures. However, although the sensors were able display temperatures
within the range of 01500 K with an estimated error of 2%, there occurred a varying cumulative (averaging) effect on each sensor due to
the line-of-sight imaging. Therefore, the imaging results are presented
qualitatively for comparison purposes.
5. Results and discussion
The streamlines, which are portrayed in Fig. 4, exhibit a very complex uid motion. Inside the burner, the vertical jet emerging from the
injector passes into the contraction tube and induces a negative pressure which draws the air from the cooking hob into the premixing
chamber. It is apparent that the sharp edges and the convoluted air passages from the hob to the chamber introduce ow separations which result in extra pressure losses and possibly insufcient airing in the
premixing chamber. A possible remedy for this problem could be to
use the streamlines to reform the surfaces and junctions along the
ow path from the hob up to the exit of the ports. The guidance of
streamlines seems useful not only to correct existing incompetencies
in the present geometry, but also to cure the impediments caused by
the local ow structures. For example, it is interesting to particularize
that even though the cross-section of the contraction tube is large
enough, the ow lls in only a small portion up to the half of the radius
of the tube, the rest being occupied with two vortices squished near the
wall (see also the zoomed region in Fig. 4). As a result, the minimum
ow area does not occur at the upper end of the contraction tube, but
occurs effectively at a distance half the length of the tube from the bottom edge. The vortices in the contraction tube apparently decrease the

Fig. 3. Schematic of the temperature imaging system.

111

aeration and introduce low-frequency uctuations. In order to solve

this problem, the minimum area must be shifted from the end of the
contraction tube down to the position where the vortices are located.
This effectively means that the contraction tube needs to be redesigned to include a throat section at the location where the streamlines are converging; that is to say, the upper half of the contraction
tube should be given a form like an ordinary Venturi tube. Since the
minimum area is located 25df, which is far downstream the potential
core and the developing region of the fuel jet, it is totally justiable to
put a throat in the contraction tube [26]. Upon the impingement on
the burner cap, the ow spreads radially and leaves the ports as the rectangular jets with an angle of around 15 to the horizontal. Outside the
burner, a buoyancy driven large toroidal vortex, appearing as two
large recirculations on both sides of the vessel, seems to be the most
dominant ow structure at the peripheries of the computational domain. The recirculations push fresh air on both sides into the combustion zone and transports the hot burned gases away in a sweeping
path on the lateral surfaces of the vessel. Furthermore, in the region
under the vessel, the large recirculations advance deep in the close vicinity of the burner where they control the aeration process in the
premixing chamber. The ratio of the momentums of the slot jets and
the advancing front of the recirculations seems to determine the penetration and the bundling of the ames towards the vessel. The ame impinges on the bottom of the vessel with the stagnation point occurring
at about one fth of the radius from the corner. It is apparent that the interference of the neighboring ames prevents the spread in the lateral
direction in between the jets so that strong wall jets are formed in the
radially inwards and outwards directions. The resulting convection in
the radial direction is expected to augment the uniformity of the heat
transfer under the vessel. This conjecture is indeed consistent with the
experimental observations [11] which suggest that the array of multiple
ames with smaller jet-to-jet spacing improves the uniformity of heat
transfer compared to a single or separated multi-jet ames. Just above
the burner, two counter-rotating concentric toroidal vortices seem to
be the main convective mechanisms to heat the vessel. The outer large
vortex is driven by the ame jets and the wall-jet formed after the impingement, and it continuously recycles the ue gases into the ames.
The outer vortex then drives the neighboring inner vortex which
seems to trap the burned gases under the vessel. This may imply that
the largest residence times are likely to occur in the inner vortex. Although this system may increase the thermal efciency, it may also
cause an increase in the emissions since there would not be sufcient
oxidizer remaining in this relatively cold inner vortex to complete the
reaction. This argument is supported by Misra [16] who showed that
with the depletion of the oxygen in regions of low temperatures, the
CO emission increased very sharply.
Fig. 5 shows the proles of the calculated and measured planar
velocity components in the ame along a horizontal line extending
from the tip of the burner cap. It is clear that the predictions of the
vertical velocity agree well with the measurements. However,
although calculations of radial velocity match very well to the measurements within the ame, they largely overpredict the measurements outside the ame zone especially far away from the slots.
Actually, this is the region under the vessel where the radiallystretched toroidal vortex dominates the ow. It has been argued
[2730] that large structures can signicantly deviate from isotropy
in partially-free wall-bounded ames and, as a result, the k-
model may not be the most suitable approach in such calculations.
Furthermore, it can be conjectured that due to their larger inertia
compared to the hot gases, TiO2 particles do not accurately follow
the streamlines at large r distances. In either way, some discrepancy
would be expected. The proles of the planar velocity components
along the vertical line are shown Fig. 6, where the size of the ame
in vertical direction is underpredicted. This basically stems from
the fact that the upper boundary of the ame is located at slightly elevated distances compared to those in predictions. Furthermore, the

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.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

Fig. 4. Streamlines on diametrical plane.

maximum velocities are also underpredicted. It is interesting to note

that the discrepancies in the radial velocity happen to be larger than
the vertical velocity. This means that the effect of buoyancy and the

resulting large recirculations are somewhat overestimated in the

present calculations. Hence, the slot jets become weaker compared
to the advancing front induced by the large recirculations.

Fig. 5. ux and ur velocity proles along a horizontal line at x = 45 mm from the hob wall.

.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

113

Fig. 6. ux and ur velocity proles along a vertical line at r = 30 mm from the tip of the cap.

Fig. 7 shows the contours of the mixture fraction on a diametrical

vertical plane. The fuel jet issued from the injector is partially blended
with the air in the premixing chamber, and the ow reaches the ports
with the fuel-rich composition with a mixture fraction of around 
0.34. It seems that self-aeration or cold mixing basically occurs up
to half the length of the contraction tube, beyond which the mixture
fraction nearly remains constant. It should be recalled from the portrait
of the streamlines that this is the location where the narrowing in the

contraction tube occurs due to the side vortices squished to the walls
of the tube. The slot jets are delivered at a very small angle with the horizontal, and spread rapidly to a large region due to the enhancement of
the mixing over the shear layers. The stoichiometric mixture fractions
can, however, be attained only after the jets confront with the advancing front of the large recirculations which prevent them from penetrating outwards. The part of jet is then curved towards the vessel where
they split into two wall-jets, one moving radially inwards and the

Fig. 7. Mixture fraction contours.

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.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

other outwards immediately under the vessel. While these wall-jets

contain rich mixtures, the lower part of the slot jet, which is forced to
turn downwards away from the vessel, has a very short path to develop
ammable parcels. The remnants of the unburned mixture in this part
together with the fresh air on the hob are then withdrawn into the
premixing chamber. These results in the premixing chamber lled
with a very lean mixture rather than the fresh air. Accordingly, a
closed-loop forms for the fuel line of the burner, which makes the burning process on the cooker-top to reach steady-state only after a transient
process. The closed-loop is also expected to promote the risk of a ashback. The tendency of the mixture feedback was observed in the experiments presented by Gattei [17], but this was only when the jets were
weak.
The predicted temperature contours are shown in Fig. 8a where a
boomerang-shaped ame (as indicated by dashed lines) appears downstream of the confrontation zone. It has a large tail stretching out
through the wall-jets under the vessel and a small tail with relatively
lower temperatures extending down towards the top of the cooker.
The maximum temperature occurs at about 1500 K near the periphery
of the bottom surface. It is located slightly away from the impingement
point under the vessel and this agrees well with the experimental ndings [16]. The ame cools as it sweeps up the lateral walls of the vessel.
The lower branch of the boomerang approaches very close to the hob
and, even though the temperatures reduce to values well below
800 K, on prolonged uses, the hot gases may have the potential to
cause undesirable yellowing of the vitreous enamel on the hob surfaces.
It should be noted that in the region between the burner cap and the
vessel where the inner vortex resides, the temperature occurs at around
450 K. This indicates that the current ame arrangement presents a very
poor performance of heating which is mostly wasted raising the temperature of the surrounding ambient air. There can be two solutions
for this drawback; the rst one is relatively simple and is achieved by increasing the angle of the fuel jets towards the vessel. The second solution is more involved and is related to the efciency of the primary

aeration. In the present conguration, the fuel-rich jets become ammable far from the port exits. It can be conjectured that if the efciency
of the primary mixing is increased, the ammable mixture can occur
much closer to the ports and, thus, the current lifted-ames can come
closer or even become attached to the ports. This may result in a
ame contact possibly covering a larger area under the vessel. In
Fig. 8b, the thermal image of the combustion under the vessel is
displayed on the negative r side. Even though there exist serious averaging effects along the line-of-sight, it still sufces qualitatively to verify
the predictions, particularly the shape and location of the ame
appearing under the vessel.
The distribution of the CO2 mass fraction, Fig. 9, shows that there are
two regions below and above the ame with different levels of CO2 concentration. Relatively lower concentrations of CO2 (below YCO2 0.10)
occur under the ame where the short residence times possibly preclude the CO conversion to CO2 which is usually a slow process [14].
The burned gases and the air on the hob is pulled into the premixing
chamber and blended with the fuel before half the length of the contraction tube. Thereafter, it remains constant at a value of YCO2 0.04 till
the burning starts in the slot jets. It turns out that the ue gas recirculation develops naturally in the current conguration; it introduces combustion products into the unburned mixture and effectively reduces the
combustion intensity, which is eventually expected to suppress the formation of the thermal NO [13]. The maximum production of CO2, however, occurs in the reaction zone near the corner of the bottom surface
where it reaches a value slightly above YCO2 0.14. CO2 gas is carried
radially inwards by the wall-jets up to the inner toroidal vortex which
remains nearly free of the burned products. If one considers CO2 as a
tracer gas for the transport of scalars (as, for example, heat) from the reaction zone, then it becomes clearly why the center of the bottom surface of the vessel remains relatively cold.
Fig. 10 shows the distribution of the H2O mass fraction, which exhibits very similar contours to those of the CO2. The only exception occurs near the step on the hob surface where the concentration of H2O

Fig. 8. a) Temperature contours over the whole computational domain, and b) thermal imaging of temperature distribution under the pan.

.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

115

Fig. 9. Contours of CO2 mass fraction.

reaches the values as high as those in the reaction zone. The maximum
concentration is limited to YH2 O = 0.10.
6. Conclusions
A modied temperature-composition pdf method and the ILDM
chemistry were used to study the CH4/air ame in a self-aerated
cooker-top burner. The work also involved the velocity measurements
and the temperature visualization in the reactive ow. It is seen that
the structure of the ow and the ame are in good agreement with
the measurements and the experimental observations. The analyses
demonstrate several points for the burner conguration under study:
1) The sharp corners and rapid changes in the surface proles of the
premixing chamber create undesirable vortices inside the bowl,
which increase pressure difference and decrease the amount of
feed air drawn from the aeration aperture. The most striking observation in the present study is about the size and location of the minimum area of the contraction tube which occurs at the half of the
length of the tube, contrary to the traditional expectation to occur

at the end of the tube joining the burner head. It becomes clear
that the efciency of aeration depends crucially on the size and the
location of the throat on the contraction tube, in which the fuel jet
is injected.

2) The ow under the vessel occurs very turbulent with complex vortex structures interacting with each other and with the jet ames.
The two concentric toroidal vortices dominate the ow; the inner
one is rather isolated and precludes ame advance towards the center where a relatively cold zone develops. The outer vortex pushes
the jet ames radially outwards, where the most of the available energy was lost in the heating of the surrounding air. As a result, buoyancy effects are enhanced, which drives the large recirculations on
the periphery of the combustion zone. It is this recirculation which
pushes the fresh air into the aeration aperture and helps the depletion of the part of the burned gases. The rest of the ue gases are
fed back into the premixing chamber, which reduces the aeration
efciency and results in incomplete combustion and increased emissions of CO.

Fig. 10. Contours of H2O mass fraction.

116

.B. zdemir, M. Kanta / Fuel Processing Technology 151 (2016) 107116

As a summary, it should be emphasized that any signicant further

progress is likely to require improvements in the designs of the contraction tube and the geometry of the slot passages.
Acknowledgments
This work has been supported in part by TUBITAK (MISAG 110M506)
and Arelik Inc.
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