Diffusion burner

Gaseous fuels. Gas burners can be diffusion flame burners or pre-aeraled burners. Diffusion flame burners may be relatively simple, with fuel gas burning at an orifice in the presence of... 

FIGURE 13.1.8 A burner diffuser made of an SiC whisker reinforced silicon nitride composite (courtesy of JMC New Materials [71]). 

SiC whisker reinforced silicon nitride has excellent thermal shock resistance, and has heen successfully used in burner diffusers for boilers in thermal power plants, as illustrated in Figure 15.1.8 [70, 71). 

Linteris, G. (2001). Suppression of cup-burner diffusion flames by supereffective chemical inhibitors and inert compounds. Proceedings of Halon Options Technical Working Conference HOTWC-2001, Albuquerque, NM, USA, April 2001. 

Materials made of siHcon nitride, siHcon oxynitride, or sialon-bonded siHcon carbide have high thermal shock and corrosion resistance and may be used for pump parts, acid spray nozzles, and in aluminum reduction ceUs (156—159). A very porous siHcon carbide foam has been considered for surface combustion burner plates and filter media. It can also be used as a substrate carrying materials such as boron nitride as planar diffusion source for semiconductor doping appHcations. 

Consider the case of the simple Bunsen burner. As the tube diameter decreases, at a critical flow velocity and at a Reynolds number of about 2000, flame height no longer depends on the jet diameter and the relationship between flame height and volumetric flow ceases to exist (2). Some of the characteristics of diffusion flames are illustrated in Eigure 5. 

Laminar Versus Turbulent Flames. Premixed and diffusion flames can be either laminar or turbulent gaseous flames. Laminar flames are those in which the gas flow is well behaved in the sense that the flow is unchanging in time at a given point (steady) and smooth without sudden disturbances. Laminar flow is often associated with slow flow from small diameter tubular burners. Turbulent flames are associated with highly time dependent flow patterns, often random, and are often associated with high velocity flows from large diameter tubular burners. Either type of flow—laminar or turbulent—can occur with both premixed and diffusion flames. 

Gas burners are of various low- to high-pressure (2-25 psi) designs, including gas-ring burners, center-diffusion tube gas burners, and turbulent gas burners. 

Since operation in an autothermal mode implies a feedback of energy to preheat the feed, provision must be made for ignition of the reactor in order to attain steady-state operation. The ordinary gas burner and many other rapid combustion reactions are examples of autothermal reactions in which the reactants are preheated to the reaction temperature by thermal conduction and radiation. (Back diffusion of free radicals also plays an important role in many combustion processes.)... 

Figure 10.2 Intermittency of a buoyant diffusion flame burning on a 0.3 m porous burner.

The principles of fluidisation, discussed in Chapter 6, are applied in this type of dryer, shown typically in Figure 16.25. Heated air, or hot gas from a burner, is passed by way of a plenum chamber and a diffuser plate, fitted with suitable nozzles to prevent any back-flow of solids, into the fluidised bed of material, from which it passes to a dust separator. Wet material is fed continuously into the bed through a rotary valve, and this mixes immediately with the dry charge. Dry material overflows through a downcomer to an integral after-cooler. An alternative design of this type of dryer is one in which a thin bed is used. 

Unlike premixed flames, which have a very narrow reaction zone, diffusion flames have a wider region over which the composition changes and chemical reactions can take place. Obviously, these changes are principally due to some interdiffusion of reactants and products. Hottel and Hawthorne [5] were the first to make detailed measurements of species distributions in a concentric laminar H2-air diffusion flame. Fig. 6.5 shows the type of results they obtained for a radial distribution at a height corresponding to a cross-section of the overventilated flame depicted in Fig. 6.2. Smyth et al. [2] made very detailed and accurate measurements of temperature and species variation across a Wolfhard-Parker burner in which methane was the fuel. Their results are shown in Figs. 6.6 and 6.7. 

Roper [10] also showed that the velocity of the fuel gases is increased due to heating and that the gases leaving the burner port at temperature T() rapidly attain a constant value 7 in the flame regions controlling diffusion thus the diffusivity in the same region is... 

The preceding analyses hold only for circular fuel jets. Roper [10] has shown, and the experimental evidence verifies [11], that the flame height for a slot burner is not the same for momentum- and buoyancy-controlled jets. Consider a slot burner of the Wolfhard-Parker type in which the slot width is x and the length is L. As discussed earlier for a buoyancy-controlled situation, the diffusive distance would not be x, but some smaller width, say xb. Following the terminology of Eq. (6.25), for a momentum-controlled slot burner,... 

This expression reveals that the height of a turbulent diffusion flame is proportional to the port radius (or diameter) above, irrespective of the volumetric fuel flow rate or fuel velocity issuing from the burner This important practical conclusion has been verified by many investigators. 

---