LAMINAR FLAME SPEEDS

Turbulent flame speed, unlike laminar flame speed, is dependent on the flow field and on both the mean and turbulence characteristics of the flow, which can in turn depend on the experimental configuration. Nonstationary spherical turbulent flames, generated through a grid, have flame speeds of the order of or less than the laminar flame speed. This turbulent flame speed tends to increase proportionally to the intensity of the turbulence. 

Fuel-pair mixtures, in soap bubbles ranging from 4 to 40 cm diameter and with no internal obstacles, produced flame speeds very close to laminar flame speeds. Cylindrical bubbles of various aspect ratios produced even lower flame speeds. For example, maximum flame speeds for ethylene of 4.2 m/s and 5.5 m/s were found in cylindrical and hemispherical bubbles, respectively (Table 4.1a). This phenomenon is attributed to reduced driving forces due to the top relief of combustion products. 

Van Wingerden and Zeeuwen (1983) demonstrated increases in flame speeds of methane, propane, ethylene, and acetylene by deploying an array of cylindrical obstacles between two plates (Table 4.3). They showed that laminar flame speed can be used as a scaling parameter for reactivity. Van Wingerden (1984) further investigated the effect of pipe-rack obstacle arrays between two plates. Ignition of an ethylene-air mixture at one edge of the apparatus resulted in a flame speed of 420 m/s and a maximum pressure of 0.7 bar. 

Overpressure within a vapor cloud is dependent upon outflow velocity, orifice diameter, and laminar flame speed expressed in the following semi-empirical relation ... 

Reference stretch-affected flame speeds as a function of Karlovitz number for various (a) n-heptane/air and (b) iso-octane/air flames, showing how the reference stretch-affected flame speed is extrapolated to zero stretch to obtain the laminar flame speed. The unburned mixture temperature T is 360 K. Solid lines represent linear extrapolation, while dotted lines denote nonlinear extrapolation... 

Figure 4.1.7 summarizes the measured laminar flame speeds of efhylene/air, n-heptane/air, fso-octane/air. 

Measured laminar flame speeds of (a) ethylene/air, (b) n-heptane/air, (c) iso-octane/air, and (d) n-decane/air mixtures as a function of the equivalence ratio for various unburned mixture temperatures. 

When representing the dependence of laminar flame speed (S°) on mixture preheat temperature (TJ in the form of S°(T, (Z>)/S°(To,(Z>) = (T /Tq)", where Tq is the lowest unburned mixture temperature investigated for a given fuel/air composition, the current experimental data can be correlated well with n in the... 

The effect of nitrogen concentration variation on laminar flame speed was also experimentally studied at... 

Laminar flame speed is one of the fundamental properties characterizing the global combustion rate of a fuel/ oxidizer mixture. Therefore, it frequently serves as the reference quantity in the study of the phenomena involving premixed flames, such as flammability limits, flame stabilization, blowoff, blowout, extinction, and turbulent combustion. Furthermore, it contains the information on the reaction mechanism in the high-temperature regime, in the presence of diffusive transport. Hence, at the global level, laminar flame-speed data have been widely used to validate a proposed chemical reaction mechanism. 

Wu, C.K. and Law, C.K., On the determination of laminar flame speeds from stretched flames, Proc. Combust. Inst.,... 

Hirasawa, T., Sung, C.J., Yang, Z., Joshi, A., Wang, H., and Law, C.K., Determination of laminar flame speeds of fuel blends using digital particle image velocimetry Ethylene, M-butane, and toluene flames, Proc. Combust. Inst., 29,1427, 2002. 

Huang, Y, Sung, C.J., and Eng, J.A., Laminar flame speeds of primary reference fuels and reformer gas mixtures, Combust. Flame, 139, 239, 2004. 

Vagelopoulos, C.M. and Egolfopoulos, F.N., Direct experimental determination of laminar flame speeds, Proc. Comb. Inst., 27 513, 1998. 

The counterflow configuration has been extensively utilized to provide benchmark experimental data for the study of stretched flame phenomena and the modeling of turbulent flames through the concept of laminar flamelets. Global flame properties of a fuel/oxidizer mixture obtained using this configuration, such as laminar flame speed and extinction stretch rate, have also been widely used as target responses for the development, validation, and optimization of a detailed reaction mechanism. In particular, extinction stretch rate represents a kinetics-affected phenomenon and characterizes the interaction between a characteristic flame time and a characteristic flow time. Furthermore, the study of extinction phenomena is of fundamental and practical importance in the field of combustion, and is closely related to the areas of safety, fire suppression, and control of combustion processes. 

Kumar, K. and Sung, G.J., Laminar flame speeds and extinction limits of preheated M-decane/02/N2 and M-dodecane/02/N2 mixtures. Combust. Flame, 151, 209, 2007. 

Sl is the laminar flame speed g the centrifugal acceleration k the thermal diffusivity of the mixture... 

No physical interpretation of the criterion was provided, but it can be regarded as the ratio of the square of the velocity of a gravity-driven "free fall bubble," of diameter equal to the flame thickness, to the square of the laminar flame speed. This leads to the conclusion that quenching occurs when a flame element quenched at the wall moves ahead of the flame, as observed and as described by Jarosinski et al. [4] (see Fig. 5 in the paper referred to) for downward propagating flames in tubes. 

In the so-called "wrinkled flame regime," the "turbulent flame speed" was expected to be controlled by a characteristic value of the turbulent fluctuations of velocity u rather than by chemistry and molecular diffusivities. Shchelkin [2] was the first to propose the law St/Sl= (1 + A u /Si) ), where A is a universal constant and Sl the laminar flame velocity of propagation. For the other limiting regime, called "distributed combustion," Summerfield [4] inferred that if the turbulent diffusivity simply replaces the molecular one, then the turbulent flame speed is proportional to the laminar flame speed but multiplied by the square root of the turbulence Reynolds number Re. ... 

Botha, J.P. and Spalding, D.B., The laminar flame speed of propane-air mixtures with heat extraction from the flame, Proc. Royal Soc. London, Ser. A., 1954, 225, 71-96. 

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