risk essential for safe infrastructure design, yet experimental characterisation across the full range of industrially relevant conditions is costly, time-consuming, and hazardous.

This project will develop and validate a computational framework for predicting the minimum ignition energy of hydrogen and hydrogen-methane fuel blends under elevated pressure (up to 30 bar) and temperature (up to 600 K) conditions, extending methodologies previously validated for hydrocarbon fuels. Using the reactingFOAM solver, the project will implement an ignition power density approach (Paleli Vasudevan and Muppala, 2024; Paleli Vasudevan et al., 2025), in which a volumetric heat source is applied to a spherical kernel and systematically varied to identify the minimum energy required for sustained flame propagation.

Both single-step and three-step hydrogen reaction mechanisms (Li et al., 2004) will be evaluated to determine the balance between computational efficiency and chemical accuracy required for reliable MIE prediction. The framework will be validated against published experimental data at atmospheric conditions (Paleli Vasudevan and Muppala, 2024; Paleli Vasudevan et al., 2025) before being extended across a systematic parametric study covering equivalence ratio, pressure, and temperature. The project will then extend the computational framework to hydrogen-methane blends spanning 10-90% hydrogen content, examining how blend composition affects ignition characteristics (Muppala et al., 2009) and developing correlations relevant to existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure. Later stages of the project will develop engineering correlations and a user-friendly computational tool for MIE prediction, alongside sensitivity and cross-validation studies of the methane-hydrogen correlations against the pressure and temperature datasets generated earlier in the project (Paleli Vasudevan et al., 2025).

risk essential for safe infrastructure design, yet experimental characterisation across the full range of industrially relevant conditions is costly, time-consuming, and hazardous.

This project will develop and validate a computational framework for predicting the minimum ignition energy of hydrogen and hydrogen-methane fuel blends under elevated pressure (up to 30 bar) and temperature (up to 600 K) conditions, extending methodologies previously validated for hydrocarbon fuels. Using the reactingFOAM solver, the project will implement an ignition power density approach (Paleli Vasudevan and Muppala, 2024; Paleli Vasudevan et al., 2025), in which a volumetric heat source is applied to a spherical kernel and systematically varied to identify the minimum energy required for sustained flame propagation.

Both single-step and three-step hydrogen reaction mechanisms (Li et al., 2004) will be evaluated to determine the balance between computational efficiency and chemical accuracy required for reliable MIE prediction. The framework will be validated against published experimental data at atmospheric conditions (Paleli Vasudevan and Muppala, 2024; Paleli Vasudevan et al., 2025) before being extended across a systematic parametric study covering equivalence ratio, pressure, and temperature. The project will then extend the computational framework to hydrogen-methane blends spanning 10-90% hydrogen content, examining how blend composition affects ignition characteristics (Muppala et al., 2009) and developing correlations relevant to existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure. Later stages of the project will develop engineering correlations and a user-friendly computational tool for MIE prediction, alongside sensitivity and cross-validation studies of the methane-hydrogen correlations against the pressure and temperature datasets generated earlier in the project (Paleli Vasudevan et al., 2025).