Near-lean blowoff dynamics in a liquid fueled combustor

Abstract This paper describes an analysis of the near-lean blow off (LBO) dynamics of spray flames, including the influence of fuel composition upon these dynamics. It is motivated by the fact that, while reasonable correlations exist for predicting blowoff conditions, the fundamental reasons for why flames supported by flow recirculation actually blow off are not well understood. Prior work on gaseous systems has shown that the blowoff event is a culmination of several intermediate processes, initiating with local extinction of reactions (“stage 1”), followed by large scale changes in flame and flow dynamics (“stage 2”), finally leading to blowoff. In this study, near-LBO dynamics were characterized for ten liquid fuels with widely varying kinetic and physical properties. Results were compared at two air inlet temperatures, 450 and 300 K, as this influences the relative importance of physical and kinetic properties in controlling LBO. Extinction, re-ignition, and recovery of the flame are evident from these data, and grow in frequency as blowoff is approached. Results show that after a near-blowoff event, the flame can move upstream at velocities much faster than the flow velocity, corresponding to re-ignition. Nonetheless, the majority of the flame recovery events appear to be associated with convection of hot products back upstream, not re-ignition. In contrast, downstream motion of the flame faster than the flow, which would correspond to bulk flame extinction, was never observed. This indicates that “extinction events” actually correspond to convection of the flame downstream by the flow when it loses its stabilization point. The dependence of the equivalence ratio when these events appear, their frequency, and event duration were quantified as a function of fuel composition and air inlet temperature. For example, the data shows a higher percentage of recovery from near-blowoff events through re-ignition for high DCN fuels at the 450 K air temperature condition. These extinction/re-ignition results suggest that high DCN fuels are harder to blow off than low DCN fuels through two mechanisms: (1) by delaying the onset of LBO precursor events, and (2) because they are able to recover from these precursor events through re-ignition more often.