Evaluating the Energy Efficiency Performance of a Micro Combustor with and without Heat Recuperation

• DOI: 10.4236/ojee.2012.12003
• Publication Date: 2012-09-30T07:32:09Z
• Authors: D. Y. Jiang; W. M. Yang; N. Aqdas; K. J. Chua
• Keywords: 02 engineering and technology; 0204 chemical engineering; 7. Clean energy

Micro-combustion research works are motivated by development of portable, autonomous power generators such as the micro TPV with improvement in energy density over batteries. Heat recuperation is a technique which contributes to better energy efficiency performance by recovering heat from the exhaust gas. In this paper, a numerical simulation is carried out to study the impact of incorporating recuperation on the performance of micro modular combustor system. The simulation results have been validated by experiments; achieving close agreement between simulated and experi-mental data. It was observed that the mean wall temperature, radiation power and emitter efficiency markedly improved with the incorporation of a heat recuperator. In addition, 25.8% enhancement of total radiation power and 30.6% emitter efficiency could be realized when the hydrogen air equivalence ratio was 0.9.