Influence of Burner Head Design on Its Thermal and Environmental Characteristics

In this paper, for the first time, four thermal and environmental objective functions are simultaneously taken into account in the process of the optimal design of a natural gas diffusion burner. The burner thermal efficiency and the emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and unburned methane constitute the objective functions of the present study. In the first step, the burner is numerically simulated, and the simulation results are verified through being compared with the available experimental data. Next, the simulation is carried out for the different set values of design variables (the dimensions of the air and fuel inlets, and the overall equivalence ratio) and the optimum design is chosen by using “Pareto front concept”. The paper will show that as a result of the mentioned procedure, the burner thermal efficiency is increased by 29.4%, and the emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and unburned methane are decreased by 81.2%, 98.6%, and 83.9%, respectively. The manuscript explains the reasoning for the superiority of the modified design over the reference one in detail.