Preliminary study was conducted on the combustion and incandescent characteristics of SiC foam combustor aiming at the application to TPV power generation, the direct conversion of heat to electric energy through photon energy. The combustion in porou...
Preliminary study was conducted on the combustion and incandescent characteristics of SiC foam combustor aiming at the application to TPV power generation, the direct conversion of heat to electric energy through photon energy. The combustion in porous media was adopted as the primary technology of TPV combustor due to its potential to make high combustion temperature and self-recuperation of exhaust heat by excess enthalpy combustion and direct and uniform heating of emitter of porous media. Experiments were conducted with varying thermal power and equivalence ratio, and the quantification of incandescence, the measurement of temperature and radiative heat flux and the exhaust gas analysis were performed. As a result, the increase of incandescent region was nearly linear with thermal power but nearly constant with equivalence ratio within given conditions. It was also found that the recuperation of exhaust heat was efficient without any additional heat exchanger and the efficiency of thermal-to-radiation conversion reached 16% beyond our expectations.