Quantitative feature extraction of turbulent premixed flames by photofragmentation laser-induced fluorescence

Planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) techniques have been widely used for flame structure visualization in recent years. Nevertheless, most of the studies were concerned with qualitative analysis of the obtained images and the quantitative analysis were much fewer. This work presents a quantitative feature extraction method to process the ribbon structures that are captured in images and represent the radical layers in flames. The extracted features include ridge lines, curvatures, and thicknesses. This method was demonstrated by processing the images of methyl (CH3) photofragmentation laser-induced fluorescence (PF-LIF) and formaldehyde (CH2O) PLIF measurements in stoichiometric, premixed methane/air flames. The flames were generated by a McKenna burner under the Reynolds numbers of 1930, 3870, and 5800. The ridge lines followed well with the wrinkled layers of CH3 and CH2O. The CH2O layers were thickened, but the CH3 layers had minor change with increased Reynold numbers.