Gas Stove: Methane Combustion

Methane Combustion in a Gas Stove — ANSYS Fluent CFD Simulation

Description

This project presents a CFD simulation of methane combustion in a gas stove — a familiar everyday device that's surprisingly rich in physics. Modeling stove combustion matters for design, optimization, safety, and efficiency. As methane burns, it raises the local temperature, which lowers the air density; the hot exhaust then rises by buoyancy, drawing fresh, denser air in to sustain the flame. In this project, you'll capture that complete cycle — combustion, heat release, and natural-draft airflow — in a full 3D model. As the opening project of the Reacting Flow: Beginner CFD Training Package, it introduces the foundational combustion workflow through the most familiar everyday burning device.

Methodology

The 3D gas stove geometry is designed in Design Modeler and meshed with a large unstructured grid of roughly 5.53 million elements using Fluent Meshing. The energy equation is activated for the reacting, heat-releasing flow, and the Species Transport model is set up with a methane combustion mechanism. The turbulence–chemistry interaction is handled with the eddy-dissipation model — a robust, efficient choice for combustion — and turbulence is modeled with the Realizable k-ε model, which offers good accuracy at low computational cost for this kind of problem. A Pressure Inlet boundary condition is applied so that the combustion air is drawn in naturally by the pressure difference rather than forced, capturing the coupled physics of combustion and buoyancy-driven natural convection.

Analysis

Post-processing produces temperature, CO₂ mass fraction, and velocity contours in both 2D axial planes and 3D, revealing the flame structure, the products of combustion, and the natural-draft airflow. The results identify a peak flame temperature of about 1709 K and a buoyancy-driven velocity of about 1.33 m/s, confirming how the heat release sets up the rising exhaust and the fresh-air intake that sustains the flame. Combustion plus natural draft appears in stoves, furnaces, water heaters, flares, and fired heaters, and the Species Transport + eddy-dissipation + buoyancy workflow built here is a foundational, widely transferable combustion-modeling skill. By the end of this project, you'll be able to set up a reacting-flow simulation with the Species Transport model and a methane combustion mechanism, configure the eddy-dissipation turbulence–chemistry interaction, apply a pressure-inlet natural-draft boundary condition, and interpret the temperature, species, and velocity fields of a buoyancy-driven combustion problem.