Porous media combustion (PMC) possesses many unique features to effectively utilize fuel, which includes better thermal efficiency. Thus making PMC a better choice when compared to conventional free flame combustion. Present study deals with variation in thickness of reaction layer to two different thicknesses; 10 and 20mm by using dual layered micro burner. In addition, two different discrete materials; alumina and zirconia was compared with each other across various ER. Burner performance was enhanced by operating burner at equivalence ratio (ER) below 1. While optimum ER for surface flame and submerged flame was found to be 0.7 and 0.6 respectively. Maximum thermal efficiency was noted by using 20mm reaction layer, the value of which was turn out to be 79 % and 72 % by using alumina and zirconia respectively. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.