No Arabic abstract
This paper presents a flame-height correlation for laminar to transition-to-turbulent regime diffusion flames. Flame-height measurements are obtained by means of numerical and experimental studies in which three high definition cameras were employed to take frontal, lateral and 45{deg} angled images simultaneously. The images were analysed using an image-processing algorithm to determine the flame-height through indirect measurement. To locate an overall chemical-flame-length, numerical simulations were conducted with the unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes technique. The eddy-dissipation model was also implemented to calculate chemical reaction rate. The experiments show that this proposed correlation has an adjustment variation of luminous flame-height for the laminar regime of 16.9%, which indicates that, without the use of the intermittent buoyant flame-height correlation, it globally best represents the flame-height in this regime. For the laminar and transition-to-turbulence regime the adjustment variations are 5.54% compared to the most accepted flame-height correlations, thus providing an acceptably good fitting. The numerical results show that the proposed range for the chemical-flame-length is located between the luminous and flickering flame zone compared to the experimental flame images. These results agree with the chemical length zone reported in the literature. Therefore, the correlation can be used for laminar and transition-to-turbulent combustion regimes.
The mixing process of multiple jets of liquefied petroleum gas and air in a diffusion flame is numerically analysed. The case study considers a four-port array burner where the fuel is injected by four peripheral nozzles and mixed with the surrounding air. Simulations are conducted with the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes technique, and the turbulence effect is modelled with the realizable k-e model. In addition, the eddy dissipation model is implemented to calculate the effect of the turbulent chemical reaction rate. Results show that the essential mixture mechanism occurs within a flame cone derived from the fuel jets interaction. However, the mixing process is driven by jets drag allowing an air/fuel smooth mixture to reach the flammability limits at two zones: one at a lower location or close to the burner surface and a second before the flame front development. The entire mixing mechanism culminates with the development of the flame necking cone. Any air concentration that falls into the cone radius will be entrained, contributing to the overall flame structure. Since the cone radius reach is limited only by radial distance of the jet array and the nozzles distance, the flame heights, consequently, depend solely on fuel mass flow.
This paper presents an experimental methodology to measure the height of the flame using convolution image processing and statistical analysis. The experimental setup employs a burner with four circularly arranged nozzles. Six different volumetric fuel flows were employed, and flame images were captured from three different visualization planes utilizing a three high-definition camera array, a thermal imaging camera and an image-processing algorithm. The flame height was indirectly measured using pixel quantification and conversion through a reference length. Although the fuel flow was the most significant factor, the visualization plane and the image source were also found to be particularly relevant, since certain flame features were only perceivable depending on the approach. The measurements were compared to different existing theoretical correlations, yielding an overall adjustment ranging from 3.25 to 3.97cm. The present methodology yields an overall statistical tolerance of 1.27 cm and an expanded uncertainty of 0.599 cm. Furthermore, the thermal imaging has revealed a consistent difference in the overall luminous observable flame of 2.54 cm. For this particular burner configuration, correlations were derived by statistical modelling, which explain the flame height fluctuations with an average setting of 97.23%.
In this visualisation, the transition from laminar to turbulent flow is characterised by the intermittent ejection of wall fluid into the outer stream. The normalised thickness of the viscous flow layer reaches an asymptotic value but the physical thickness drops exponentially after transition. The critical transition pipe Reynolds number can be obtained simply by equating it with the asymptotic value of the normalised thickness of viscous flow layer. Key words: Transition, critical stability Reynolds number, critical transition Reynolds number, non-Newtonian pipe flow
Diffusive transport of mass occurs at small scales in turbulent premixed flames. As a result, multicomponent mass transport, which is often neglected in direct numerical simulations (DNS) of premixed combustion, has the potential to impact both turbulence and flame characteristics at small scales. In this study, we evaluate these impacts by examining enstrophy dynamics and the internal structure of the flame for lean premixed hydrogen-air combustion, neglecting secondary Soret and Dufour effects. We performed three-dimensional DNS of these flames by implementing the Stefan-Maxwell equations in the code NGA to represent multicomponent mass transport, and we simulated statistically planar lean premixed hydrogen-air flames using both mixture-averaged and multicomponent models. The mixture-averaged model underpredicts the peak enstrophy by up to 13% in the flame front. Comparing the enstrophy budgets of these flames, the multicomponent simulation yields larger peak magnitudes compared to the mixture-averaged simulation in the reaction zone, showing differences of 17% and 14% in the normalized stretching and viscous effects terms. In the super-adiabatic regions of the flame, the mixture-averaged model overpredicts the viscous effects by up to 13%. To assess the effect of these differences on flame structure, we reconstructed the average local internal structure of the turbulent flame through statistical analysis of the scalar gradient field. Based on this analysis, we show that large differences in viscous effects contribute to significant differences in the average local flame structure between the two models.
Extinction strain rate (ESR) and laminar flame speed (LFS) are fundamental properties of a fuel/air mixture that are often utilized as scaling parameters in turbulent combustion. While LFS at atmospheric and elevated pressures are extensively investigated, experimental measurements of ESR with counterflow premixed flames are very limited for flame instability often occurs near extinction, especially at high pressures. Due to the scarcity of ESR measurements, most combustion kinetic models are mainly validated and optimized against LFS. However, it is questionable whether the controlling reactions are the same for ESR and LFS such that those models are also valid for predicting ESR. This work quantifies the kinetic similarities between ESR and LFS by analyzing their kinetic sensitivity directions. The direction is represented by a unit vector composed of the normalized sensitivity of ESR or LFS to the rate constant for each elemental reaction. Consequently, the similarity between the two directions is measured by the inner product of the corresponding unit vectors. The sensitivity directions of ESR and LFS are found parallel for various fuels, equivalence ratios, and pressures. Furthermore, sensitivity directions at various strain rates are also similar for the maximum temperature, local temperature at various locations in the flame coordinate, and ESR in counterflow premixed flames. These findings suggest that LFS and ESR are similarly effective as the target for constraining and optimizing rate constants in kinetic models. In addition, the independence of the sensitivity directions on the strain rate also enables us to perform uncertainty quantification for turbulent flames with a wide range of strain rates based on the kinetic sensitivity of ESR and LFS.