Effects of intrinsic flame instabilities on nitrogen oxide formation in laminar premixed ammonia/hydrogen/air flames

This study investigates the characteristics of nitrogen oxide (NO) formation in two-dimensional (2D) laminar premixed ammonia/hydrogen/air flames and the impact of thermo-diffusively driven intrinsic flame instabilities (IFIs). To this end, a set of three highly resolved direct numerical simulations (DNS) at lean ambient conditions and varying hydrogen fraction in the fuel blend are conducted. The analysis of these DNS reveals a significant increase of NO formation in positively curved regions of the flame, particularly for lower hydrogen fuel fractions, while negatively curved areas exhibit reduced NO concentrations. However, despite the strong variations of local mass fractions of NO in the flame sheet, the mean mass fraction in the post-flame region remains close to the solution from a one-dimensional flame. Through a representative flame segment analysis of positively curved, negatively curved, and flat regions, key reactions contributing to NO formation are determined, with the HNO pathway being the predominant production and the de pathway being the predominant consumption pathway across all cases. Thermal NO plays no significant role in the considered cases. Generally, the peaks of NO production shift to lower values of progress variable in the negatively curved regions, leading to an annihilation of the production and consumption terms in the low hydrogen fuel fraction case. The decrease of NO production is found to be mainly driven by changes of the radical concentrations, rather than changes of the temperature-dependent reaction rate coefficients.