Numerical Simulation of the Effect of Magnetic Fields on Soot Formation in Laminar Non-Premixed Flames Edison E. Chukwuemeka, Ingmar M. Schoegl ∗ Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Louisiana State University Abstract Characteristics of non-premixed flames such as flame height and lift-off height are affected by the presence of magnetic fields due to the para- magnetic properties of some combustion species. However, it is unknown whether magnetic fields can be used to reduce the emission of pollutants in non-premixed flames. In general, pollutant emissions are reduced in combustion systems if the mixing of com- bustion species is enhanced during the process. Since paramagnetic combustion species such as O 2 , O, OH, HO 2 , etc have a preferential motion direction in the presence of magnetic fields, there is a potential to harness this effect of mixing by imposing a magnetic field on the flame. This study seeks to provide some insights on the effect of magnetic field on pollutants gen- erated in a laminar non-premixed flame nu- merically. The non-premixed flame is simu- lated using a detailed chemical mechanism for propane–air combustion and a modified Moss- Brookes soot model. To simulate the effect of magnetism on the paramagnetic chemical species, the species paramagnetic susceptibility is computed using the Curie relation. The non- premixed flame is placed at three different loca- ∗ Address all correspondence related to ischoegl@lsu.edu. tions within the magnetic field. The computation predicted that the amount of average pollutants reduction is dependent on the location of the flames within the magnetic fields with respect to magnetic gradients. The mass weighted average of the soot volume frac- tion over the computational domain decreased when the non-premixed flame is located at cer- tain locations within the magnetic field of the solenoid with respect to the absence of the mag- netic fields, but increases in other locations. Nomenclature Latin Letters B Magnetic field intensity [T] b ∗ n Normalized soot nuclei concentration [particles × 1 × 10 −15 / kg] C α Soot inception rate model constant [1/ s] C β Soot coagulation rate model constant C γ Soot surface growth rate model scaling factor [kgm/ kmols] C ω 1 , C ω 2 Soot oxidation model constant for OH and O respectively [kg − m/ (kmolK 1 2 s)] C ox Soot oxidation scaling parameter d p Soot average diameter [m] e t Total specific internal energy [kJ/ kg] F m,i Magnetic Force of the gaseous species i [N/ m 3 ] f k Body force per unit mass [N/ kg] F v Integrated soot volume fraction f v Soot volume fraction 1 Copyright © 2021 by ASME Proceedings of the ASME 2021 Power Conference POWER2021 July 20-22, 2021, Virtual, Online POWER2021-64859