Calculating Adiabatic Flame Temperature — Cantera 3.2.0 documentation

This guide demonstrates calculation of the adiabatic flame temperature for a methane/air mixture, comparing calculations which assume either complete or incomplete combustion.
The stoichiometric equation for complete combustion of a lean methane/air mixture (\(\phi < 1\)) is:
For a rich mixture (\(\phi > 1\)), this becomes:
To find the flame temperature resulting from these reactions using Cantera, we create a Solution object containing only the species in the above stoichiometric equations, and then use the Solution.equilibrate function to find the resulting mixture composition and temperature, taking advantage of the fact that equilibrium will strongly favor conversion of the fuel molecule.
In the case of incomplete combustion, the resulting mixture composition is not known in advance, but must be found by calculating the equilibrium composition at constant enthalpy and temperature:
Now, we use a gas phase object containing all 53 species defined in the GRI 3.0 mechanism, and compute the equilibrium composition as a function of equivalence ratio.
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