Combustion: Methane Combustion in a Gas Stove

What You'll Build

This lesson walks you through 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 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 3-D model.

What You'll Learn

• Why combustion modeling matters for stove design, safety, and efficiency

• The coupled physics of combustion and buoyancy-driven natural convection

• How to design a 3-D gas stove geometry in Design Modeler

• How to generate a large unstructured mesh (~5.53 million elements) using Fluent Meshing

• How to activate and use the energy equation for a reacting, heat-releasing flow

• How to set up the Species Transport model with a methane combustion mechanism

• How to configure eddy-dissipation turbulence–chemistry interaction — a robust, efficient choice for combustion

• Why the k-ε Realizable model is well suited to combustion: good accuracy at low computational cost

• How to apply a Pressure Inlet boundary condition so combustion air is drawn in naturally by the pressure difference (rather than forced)

• How to post-process temperature, CO₂ mass fraction, and velocity contours in both 2-D axial planes and 3-D — identifying the peak flame temperature (~1709 K) and buoyancy-driven velocity (~1.33 m/s)

Why It Matters

Combustion plus natural draft appears in stoves, furnaces, water heaters, flares, and fired heaters. The Species Transport + eddy-dissipation + buoyancy workflow you build here is a foundational, widely transferable combustion modeling skill.