Calculating Heating Value of a Fuel — Cantera 3.2.0 documentation

This guide demonstrates how to use Cantera’s thermodynamic data to calculate the lower heating value (LHV) and higher heating value (HHV) of methane and other fuels.
The complete reaction for heating methane is:
We compute the lower heating value (LHV) as the difference in enthalpy (per kg mixture) between reactants and products at constant temperature and pressure, divided by the mass fraction of fuel in the reactants.
The LHV is calculated assuming that water remains in the gas phase. However, more energy can be extracted from the mixture if this water is condensed. This value is the higher heating value (HHV).
The ideal gas mixture model used here cannot calculate this contribution directly. However, Cantera also has a non-ideal equation of state which can be used to compute this contribution.
We can generalize this calculation by determining the composition of the products automatically rather than directly specifying the product composition. This can be done by computing the elemental mole fractions of the reactants mixture and noting that for complete combustion, all of the carbon ends up as \(\t{CO_2}\), all of the hydrogen ends up as \(\t{H_2O}\), and all of the nitrogen ends up as \(\t{N_2}\). From this, we can compute the ratio of these species in the products.
© Copyright 2001-2025, Cantera Developers.
Created using Sphinx 7.3.7.
Built with the PyData Sphinx Theme 0.15.4.