Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) is used in various applications for commercial and

domestic purposes. It is a multicomponent fuel chiefly containing propane and

butane besides other higher hydrocarbons in trace amounts. Though several kinetic
mechanisms [1-6] are available in the literature, detailed 2- D numerical studies
on LPG flames are scarce due to complex kinetics and high computational cost.
Cathonet et al. [1] studied the high temperature oxidation of propane and n-butane
fuels in a quartz reactor over a range of equivalence ratios. Sung et al. [2]
numerically investigated the effect of reformer gas addition on flame speeds and
flammability limits of n-butane flames using a reduced kinetic mechanism and it
predicted the flame speed with good accuracy. Experimental and numerical studies of
Bakali et al. [5] predicted the temperature and species concentration profiles
within experimental uncertainty for atmospheric laminar premixed n-butane flames at
two different equivalence ratios. Dagaut et al. [6] and Lee et al. [7] studied LPG
blended fuels and showed the oxidation pathways and understood the effect of NO
emission levels with increased concentration of DME blend respectively. Wang et al.
[8] used 1-D model to numerically investigate the LPG-H2 flames with a kinetic
mechanism consisting of 69 species in order to understand effect of laminar burning
velocity upon hydrogen addition. Akram et al. [9] investigated the laminar burning
velocities of LPG mixtures at elevated temperatures for a range of equivalence
ratios using USC 2.0 mechanism and found out the variation of burning velocity with
mixture equivalence ratio is similar to that of single component fuel. Panigrahy
and Mishra [10] analysed the combustion of LPG in porous radiant burner with USC
2.0 mechanism and reported an increase in the combustion efficiency and reduction
in CO emissions. Although several numerical simulations have been done for LPG
flames, detailed numerical simulations in two dimensions have not been attempted
yet. This may be due to the complexity in the kinetics and large computational cost
associated with it. Moreover, the 2-D numerical study can give better insight about
the flame stability upon investigating the flame transient phenomena such as lift
off and blow off. Hence in the present work a reduced kinetic mechanism is obtained
and subsequently the numerical model is well validated for propane, n-butane and
LPG flames in different configurations.