Research Projects

Over several decades, fossil fuels have contributed towards more than 80% of the global energy requirements. In the ever growing global economy, the energy demand has been continuously escalating the further utilization of oil, coal, natural gas, etc., along with other renewable sources. Many countries are involved in developing reliable and sustainable alternative energy technologies that are environment-friendly and economical, for smooth energy transition. In recent times, metal fuels are gaining significant interest as a new class of promising high-energy-density recyclable fuels. Metals do not contain carbon, and their combustion is free of greenhouse gases. Also, their combustion products are solid metal oxides, which can be captured and regenerated back into the original metal using different renewable energy sources. In well-defined environments, metal fuels dispersed densely in oxidizers, burn like hydrocarbon fuels, to generate combustion products of metal oxides. If the post-combustion oxides are captured efficiently, a fully sustainable energy system can be created. Therefore, metal fuels may provide a realistic and fully recyclable alternative fuels, which is an appealing prospect for large-scale power generation applications. However, the main problem is that our fundamental scientific knowledge to support the metal fuel combustion/regeneration cycle is limited and needs to be developed. Also, the dynamics and behaviour of metal fuel flames depend on many parameters such as fuel type, surrounding atmosphere, equivalence ratio, particle size and number density, and inter-particle distance, etc. This proposed project will focus on some of these aspects on metal fuel combustion. The first part of this project will develop a metal particle burner to allow for stabilizing laminar metal fuel flames. An existing burner at IIT Hyderabad will be modified to include particle image velocimetry (PIV), dust concentration measurements and pyrometry techniques to study the propagation and stabilization of different metal fuel flames. Various experimental techniques such as direct imaging, pyrometry, chemiluminescence, PIV and diagnostics will be employed for studying the detailed structure and characterization of different metal fuel flames. Next, the focus will be on investigating the influence of various parameters on dense metal flames. (a) metal type (Al, Fe, Mg), metal particle sizes (nano and micron-sized), inter-particle distance; (b) different proportions of metal particles; (c) different O2/N2 environments and ambient conditions. This will lead to further understanding of combustion mechanisms of different metal fuel flames under laminar conditions and will pave the way for later turbulent flame studies. Finally, the reduction of resultant product oxides will be explored to assess their recyclability, reusability potential and techno-economic benefits.