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Published June 14, 2006 | Submitted
Report Open

Experimental investigation of planar strained methane-air and ethylene-air flames

Abstract

The extinction of planar strained methane-air flames in the stagnation-point flow is studied. A thermal analysis has been conducted in order to build a new copper stagnation plate which can be heated up to 1000K, and allows investigation of downstream heat loss as extinction driving mechanism. Since premixed stagnation flames are mostly sensitive to the composition of the mixture, axial velocity and CH radical profiles are simultaneously measured for different equivalence ratios, using respectively Particle Streak Velocimetry (PSV) and Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF). These are compared to simulations using CANTERA stagnation flow code with a multicomponent molecular transport model, with the following chemical kinetics mechanisms: GRI-MECH 3.0, the C3-Davis, San-Diego 200308 and San-Diego 200503 mechanisms. In methane-air flames, simulations accurately predict the velocity and CH profiles from Phi=0.8 to Phi=1.2, but the flame speed turns out to be overpredicted at Phi=0.7 by all mechanisms except the C3-Davis mechanism (see Bergthorson et al. 2005a). The experiment at Phi=1.3 would need to be reconducted. Also, measured relative concentrations of CH are compared to numerical predictions using each of the four mechanisms cited above. Composition variations impact on ethylene-air flames was also investigated due to a peculiar jump in the overprediction of flame velocities from Phi=1.6 to Phi=1.8 (Bergthorson 2005). This peculiar feature was found to be repeatable, but the cause remains unclear. Methane-air laminar flame speeds Su0 were computed using CANTERA freely propagating flame code for the following chemical kinetics mechanisms: GRI-MECH 3.0, the C3-Davis mechanism, the San Diego 200308, 200503, and 200506 mechanisms, for variable pressures (1,2,5,10,20 atm) and equivalence ratios (0.6-1.4). Even for methane, whose chemistry is one of the best understood, the scatter between the different mechanisms is significant. Both composition and pressure were found to affect Su0 substantially, although composition variations seem to excite the differences in the predictions among the different mechanisms the most.

Additional Information

The work was funded by AFOSR Grant FA9550-04-1-0020, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 24, 2023