Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2008. / Vita. The entire thesis text is included in file. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed November 24, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-69).

Laminar flame speed of a novel liquid bio-fuel has been determined experimentally using a closed spherical combustion vessel of 29 L equipped with two pairs of fused silica windows for optical access at atmospheric pressure and elevated temperature conditions. Schlieren technique was used to visualize and record the temporal evolution of the outwardly spherical flame front, and an in-house developed Matlab code was employed to process the flame front images and calculate its area by applying several image processing techniques. The test conditions consisted of varying the fuel-air mixture equivalence ratio at atmospheric standard pressure and different initial temperatures. Validation of the present method was achieved by measuring and comparing the flame speed of methane/air and n-heptane/air mixture with their published counterparts. Experimental results revealed comparable laminar flame speed of the novel liquid biofuel (1, 3- dimethoxyoctane) to heavy liquid hydrocarbons such as n-heptane and isooctane, especially at stoichiometric and fuel rich conditions. Additionally, the flammability limits of this novel fuel showed similarities with those of gaseous hydrocarbons fuels (e.g. methane, ethane) but higher than those of liquid hydrocarbons (e.g. diesel, gasoline). / February 2016

Due to concerns about pollutant emission combustion systems are increasingly being designed to operate in a lean premixed mode. However, the reduction in emissions offered by lean premixed combustion can be offset by its susceptibility to instabilities and ignition and extinction problems. These instabilities, caused by the coupling of unsteady heat release and pressure fluctuations can cause significant damage to combustion devices. One method of avoiding these problems whilst still operating a globally lean system is to employ a stratified premixed mode where areas of richer mixture are used to enhance the stability of the flame. In this thesis a computational modelling methodology for the simulation of stratified premixed flames is developed. Firstly, several sub-models for the dissipation rate of a reacting scalar are evaluated by the simulation of two laboratory scale flames, a turbulent stratified V-flame and a dump combustor fed by two streams of different mixture strength. This work highlights the importance of this quantity and its influence on the simulation results. Any model for stratified combustion requires at least two variables to describe the thermochemical state of the gas: one to represent the mixing field and another to capture the progress of reaction. In turbulent stratified flames the joint probability density function (pdf) of these variables can be used to recover the mean reaction rates. A new formulation for this pdf based on copula methods is presented and evaluated alongside two alternative forms. The new method gives improved results in the simulation of the two test cases above. As it is likely that practical stratified combustion devices will have some unsteadiness to the flow the final part of this work applies the modelling methodology to an unsteady test case. The influence of the unsteady velocity forcing on the pollutant emissions is investigated. Finally the methodology is used to simulate a developmental, liquid fuelled, lean burn aero-engine combustor. Here the model gives reasonable predictions of the measured pollutant emissions for a relatively small computational cost. As such it is hoped that the modelling methodology presented can be useful in the iterative industrial design process of stratified combustion systems.

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Orientador: João Andrade de Carvalho / Coorientador: Andrés Armando Mendiburu Zevallos / Banca: Eliana Vieira Canettieri / Banca: Cristiane Aparecida Martins / Banca: Christian Jeremi Coronado Rodríguez / Banca: Marco Antonio Rosa do Nascimento / Resumo: O presente trabalho teve como objetivo a determinação experimental da velocidade laminar de chamas pré-misturadas de misturas de etanol anidro - ar na temperatura ambiente, em pressões variadas utilizando-se de uma bancada construída para este fim. Misturas com diferentes razões de equivalência, inclusive com valores próximos aos limites de inflamabilidade, foram testadas em pressões sub-atmosféricas utilizando-se a bancada cuja construção foi aqui desenvolvida. Os resultados obtidos para velocidades de combustão de chamas pré-misturadas, com diferentes razões de equivalência e diferentes pressões ambientes sub atmosféricas, são inéditos. Os experimentos foram realizados a 80, 60, 40 e 20 kPa. Este trabalho, portanto, é de importância geral em combustão. A maior inovação é a determinação da velocidade de chamas pré-misturadas de etanol anidro com ar, em atmosfera controlada e com pressões menores que a atmosférica e com razões de misturas próximas ao limite de inflamabilidade. É de importância também para futuros estudos de combustão de etanol e para o desenvolvimento de modelos de combustão de etanol / Abstract: This work proposes as objective the experimental determination of the laminar velocity of premixed flames of anhydrous ethanol - air mixtures at room temperature, at varying pressures using the built for this bench. Mixtures with different equivalence ratios, including values close to flammability limits, were tested at sub-atmospheric pressures using this bench. The results obtained for pre-mixed flame combustion velocities with different equivalence ratios and different sub atmospheric ambient pressures are inedit. The experiments were performed at 80, 60, 40 and 20 kPa. This work, therefore, is of general importance in combustion. The major innovation is the determination of the rate of consumption of premixed anhydrous ethanol with air flames, in controlled atmosphere and with pressures lower than atmospheric and with mixing ratios close to the flammability limit. It is also of importance for future ethanol combustion studies and for the development of ethanol combustion models / Doutor

Gasoline is a complex fuel containing hundreds of species, and, therefore, it is quite difficult to model all components present in gasoline. Alternatively, researchers tend to employ simpler surrogates that mimic targeted physical and chemical properties of gasoline. Two properties of gasoline, i.e., autoignition and laminar flame speed, play key role in the overall performance of spark-ignition and modern engines. For fuel-engine optimization, it is very important to have simple models which can accurately predict autoignition and laminar flame speed of gasoline. In this work, universal laminar flame speed correlation is proposed for typical gasolines. This correlation is based on Monte-Carlo simulations of randomly generated mixtures comprising of 21 gasoline-relevant molecules. Laminar flame speed of each molecule is numerically computed over a wide range of thermodynamic conditions using detailed chemical kinetic models, while flame speed of each mixture is estimated using a mixing rule. The proposed universal correlation is validated against experimentally-measured laminar flame speed of various gasoline fuels.

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No description available.

Pressure pulsations, or thermoacoustic instabilities, as they are called in the research community, can cause extensive damage in gas turbine combustion chambers. To understand the phenomena related to thermoacoustics, a simple Rijke-type tube combustor was built and studied. Extensive experimental results, as well as theoretical analyses related to the Rijke tube are presented in this thesis. The results, attributable to both the analyses and the experiments, help explain all the phenomena affecting the acoustic pressure in the combustor. The conclusion is that there are three separate yet related physical processes affecting the acoustic pressure in the tube. The three mechanisms are as follows: a main thermoacoustic instability in accordance to the Rayleigh Criterion; a vibrating flame instability where the flame sheet exhibits mode shapes; and a pulsating flame instability driven by heat losses to the flame stabilizer. All these instabilities affect the heat released to the gas in the combustor. The energy from the oscillating heat couples with the acoustics of the volume bounded by the tube structure. The experimental results in the study are important in order to obtain model parameters for prediction as well as for achieving control of the instabilities. / Master of Science

Modern industrial society is based on combustion with ever increasing standards on the efficiency of burning. One of the main combustion characteristics is the burning rate, which is influenced by intrinsic flame instabilities, external turbulence and flame interaction with walls of combustor and sound waves. In the present work we started with the problem how to include combustion along the vortex axis into the general theory of turbulent burning. We demonstrated that the most representative geometry for such problem is a hypothetic “tube” with rotating gaseous mixture. We obtained that burning in a vortex is similar to the bubble motion in an effective acceleration field created by the centrifugal force. If the intensity of the vortex is rather high then the flame speed is determined mostly by the velocity of the bubble. The results obtained complement the renormalization theory of turbulent burning. Using the results on flame propagation along a vortex we calculated the turbulent flame velocity, compared it to the experiments and found rather good agreement. All experiments on turbulent combustion in tubes inevitably involve flame interaction with walls. In the present thesis flame propagation in the geometry of a tube with nonslip walls has been widely studied numerically and analytically. We obtained that in the case of an open tube flame interaction with nonslip walls leads to the oscillating regime of burning. The oscillations are accompanied by variations of the curved flame shape and the velocity of flame propagation. If flame propagates from the closed tube end, then the flame front accelerates with no limit until the detonation is triggered. The above results make a good advance in solving one of the most difficult problems of combustion theory, the problem of deflagration to detonation transition. We developed the analytical theory of accelerating flames and found good agreement with results of direct numerical simulations. Also we performed analytical and numerical studies of another mechanism of flame acceleration caused by initial conditions. The flame ignited at the axis of a tube acquires a “finger” shape and accelerates. Still, such acceleration takes place for a rather short time until the flame reaches the tube wall. In the case of flame propagating from the open tube end to the closed one the flame front oscillates and therefore generates acoustic waves. The acoustic waves reflected from the closed end distort the flame surface. When the frequency of acoustic mode between the flame front and the tube end comes in resonance with intrinsic flame oscillations the burning rate increases considerably and the flame front becomes violently corrugated.