Publications

Design of model-friendly turbulent non-premixed jet burners for C 2+ hydrocarbon fuels

Zhang, Jiayao; Shaddix, Christopher R.; Schefer, Robert W.

Experimental measurements in laboratory-scale turbulent burners with well-controlled boundary and flow configurations can provide valuable data for validating models of turbulence-chemistry interactions applicable to the design and analysis of practical combustors. This paper reports on the design of two canonical nonpremixed turbulent jet burners for use with undiluted gaseous and liquid hydrocarbon fuels, respectively. Previous burners of this type have only been developed for fuels composed of H2, CO, andor methane, often with substantial dilution. While both new burners are composed of concentric tubes with annular pilot flames, the liquid-fuel burner has an additional fuel vaporization step and an electrically heated fuel vapor delivery system. The performance of these burners is demonstrated by interrogating four ethylene flames and one flame fueled by a simple JP-8 surrogate. Through visual observation, it is found that the visible flame lengths show good agreement with standard empirical correlations. Rayleigh line imaging demonstrates that the pilot flame provides a spatially homogeneous flow of hot products along the edge of the fuel jet. Planar imaging of OH laser-induced fluorescence reveals a lack of local flame extinction in the high-strain near-burner region for fuel jet Reynolds numbers (Re) less than 20 000, and increasingly common extinction events for higher jet velocities. Planar imaging of soot laser-induced incandescence shows that the soot layers in these flames are relatively thin and are entrained into vortical flow structures in fuel-rich regions inside of the flame sheet. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.