Catalytic combustion over flat plate
 

I am trying to simulate the catalytic combustion of methane and air over a flat platinum foil. I am having trouble getting a reasonable solution comparable to what we have seen in the lab.

This is a laminar, constant velocity, constant concentration flow. The plate is heated only by the surface reaction. Even when I up the inlet temperature far over the surface ignition temperature, I am seeing no products or an increase in surface temperature.

I have tried initializing with a high temp and products and intermediates present as well as patching a high surface temp and surface products/intermediates. The solution "looks right" about 3/4s of the way to convergence, but as the iteration proceeds, the high temps used initially (or patched in) disappear.

I am using chemkin gaseous and surface mechanisms, have turned on reaction in the wall boundary conditions, and have specified the platinum site density in the mechanism edit window.

Any suggestions on what I've missed or what else to try? I am very new to Fluent and modeling in general so no suggestion is too simple.

Thanks much, Suzy

Hi

Have you solved this problem. I am doing the same simulation and can not get reaction started. I tried patching a 2000K temperature to the whole computation domain and it was like a cold flow heated by high temperature domain.

weiqiang