Motivated by the high demand for an alternative, more reliable, high energy ignition source to facilitate the re-ignition of lean-burn combustion chambers which are necessary to reduce pollutant emissions, a new set-up has been designed to study plasma / microwave sources. The use of a waveguide-based resonant cavity leads to very low power plasma ignition. An example in this paper shows that a plasma at atmospheric pressure can be maintained with less than 2 W input power.
Such a performance is possible using the large variety of possible adjustments (resonance frequency, different kind of initiators,…) that this versatile set-up offers. To illustrate the wide range of possible studies, another example is given and discussed : Minimum ignition energy for an ethanol droplet stream with aluminum and stainless steel initiators. The results show that the initiator material and its surface quality have an influence on the minimum ignition energy, especially for large gaps. Depending on the gap size we can get down to under 10 W entering the cavity to ignite the droplet stream.
The high demand for an alternative ignition system for air breathing engines has motivated lot of innovative studies in the last decades. The present paper discusses the results of kerosene droplet ignition with a waveguide based resonant cavity. We show that with this kind of setup, the needed power (injected in the cavity) required to ignite kerosene droplets (with diameter 130 m) is as low as 4.5 W, depending on the gap size.
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