| Summary: | These days, various national and international research organizations are working on the development of low NO<sub>x</sub> combustors. The present work describes the experimental and numerical characterization of flow dynamics and combustion characteristics in a rectangular burner. A ring-needle type plasma actuator was developed and driven by a high voltage nanosecond pulsed generator under atmospheric conditions. Smoke flow visualizations and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) were carried out to identify the relevant flow structures. Electrical characterization of the non-reactive flow was carried out to predict the electrical power and the optimum value of the reduced electric field (E<sub>N</sub>), which is useful for the implementation of a numerical model for the study of plasma-assisted ignition. A detailed plasma kinetic mechanism integrated with all excited species was considered and validated with experimental studies. Numerical modeling of plasma ignition has been performed by coupling ZDPlasKin with CHEMKIN. Energy and power consumption for methane/air plasma actuation is higher than the air plasma actuation. This could be due to the excitation and ionization of methane that required more energy deposition and power. The mole fraction of O atoms and ozone was higher in the air than the methane/air actuation. However, O atoms were produced in a very short time interval of 10<sup>−7</sup> to 10<sup>−6</sup> s; in contrast, the concentration of ozone was gradually increased with the time interval and the peak was observed around 10<sup>−1</sup> s. Plasma discharges on the methane/air mixture also produced radicals that played a key role to enhance the combustion process. It was noticed that the concentration of H species was high among all radicals with a concentration of nearly 10<sup>−1</sup>. The concentration peak of CH<sub>3</sub> and OH was almost the same in the order of 10<sup>−2</sup>. Finally, the mixture ignition characteristics under different low inlet temperatures were analyzed for both air and methane/air plasma actuation in the presence of different plasma discharges pulses numbers. Results showed that it is possible to reach flame ignition at inlet temperature lower than the minimum required in the absence of plasma actuation, which means ignition is possible in cold flow, which could be essential to address the re-ignition problems of aeroengines at high altitudes. At Ti = 700 K, the ignition was reached only with plasma discharges; ignition time was in the order of 0.01 s for plasma discharges on methane/air, lower than in case of plasma in air, which permitted ignition at 0.018 s. Besides this, in the methane/air case, 12 pulses were required to achieve successful ignition; however, in air, 19 pulses were needed to ignite.
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