Planar Flame Temperature Measurement

Posted by Enurga on August 28th, 2019

When a combustion system is developed, for instance, spark ignition engines, gas turbine combustors and industrial heating furnaces, it is necessary to understand the basics and technicalities of flame propagation. It helps in understanding various characteristics of combustion processes such as diffusivity, reactivity and exothermicity of different fuel-air mixtures. When it comes to fuel-air mixtures, laminar burning velocity is considered to be a crucial parameter. 

This laminar burning velocity can be referred to as the velocity of a 1-D laminar propagation of a planar and adiabatic combustion wave into the uniform fuel-air mixture. This characteristic velocity greatly affects the structure of a premixed flame. It is critical to have the knowledge of this velocity at high temperatures for design combustion system including internal combustion engines, gas turbine systems, modeling turbulent combustion and validating chemical kinetic mechanisms. 

The flame propagation in such small scale channels has very rich dynamics such as ignition phenomena, repetitive extinction and pulsating flames due to the presence of intense flame-wall coupling. Apart from all these things, in some situations, you also need to evaluate other characteristics. The planar temperature in flames, for example, is required to determine in order to understand the behavior of flames and their dynamics. The flame becomes planar and completely stable when the flow velocity is the same as the burning velocity of the mixture at that temperature. By determining the thinness of flames, it can be confirmed that in which direction the flame is planar. 

One can study about the planar temperature in flames with the aid of a spectrophotometer. In the market, there are several high-end spectrophotometer models available. EN series of spectrophotometer offered by En’Urga Inc make the ideal choice to evaluate the planar temperature in flames. These spectrometers are mainly used for the analysis of combustion by-products and for emission and temperature measurements. 

This equipment is used in a variety of applications such as combustion research, temperature measurement in flames, gas concentration measurement in flames, soot volume fraction measurements in flames, flame spread measurements, solid surface or flame impingement studies and even in emission tomography for large scale fire. There are also several industrial applications for which this equipment can be used such as temperature and species measurements in gas turbine combustor, turbine blade and glass furnace temperature measurement, emissivity monitoring, and molten and hot process monitoring. 

Thus, for studying, evaluation, analysis and temperature measurements in planar flames in various systems (like combustion systems, furnace elements, etc.) where knowledge of flame dynamics is essential, spectrophotometers prove to be very useful.