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Accurate measurement techniques for in situ determination of soot are necessary to understand and monitor the process of soot particle production. One of these techniques is line-of-sight extinction, which is a fast, low-cost and quantitative method to investigate the soot volume fraction in flames. However, the extinction-based technique suffers from relatively high measurement uncertainty due to low signal-to-noise ratio, as the single-pass attenuation of the laser beam intensity is often insufficient. Multi-pass techniques can increase the sensitivity, but may suffer from low spatial resolution. To overcome this problem, we have developed a high spatial resolution laser cavity extinction technique to measure the soot volume fraction from low-soot-producing flames. A laser beam cavity is realised by placing two partially reflective concave mirrors on either side of the laminar diffusion flame under investigation. This configuration makes the beam convergent inside the cavity, allowing a spatial resolution within 200 μm, whilst increasing the absorption by an order of magnitude. Three different hydrocarbon fuels are tested: methane, propane and ethylene. The measurements of soot distribution across the flame show good agreement with results using laser-induced incandescence (LII) in the range from around 20 ppb to 15 ppm.

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We experimentally study the nonlinear dynamics of a self-excited thermoacoustic system subjected to acoustic forcing. Our aim is to relate these dynamics to the behavior of universal model oscillators subjected to external forcing.The self-excited system under study consists of a swirl-stabilized turbulent premixed flame (equivalence ratio of 0.8 and thermal power of 13.6 kW) enclosed in a quartz tube with an open-ended exit. We acoustically force this system at different amplitudes and frequencies, and measure its response with pressure transducers and OH * chemiluminescence from the flame. By analyzing the data with the power spectral density and the Poincaré map, we find a range of nonlinear dynamics, including (i) a shifting of the self-excited frequency towards or away from the forcing frequency as the forcing amplitude increases; (ii) an accompanying transition from periodicity to two-frequency quasiperiodicity; and (iii) an eventual suppression of the self-excited amplitude, indicating synchronization of the self-excited mode with the forced mode. By further analyzing the data with the Hilbert transform, we find evidence of phase trapping, a partially synchronous state characterized by frequency locking without phase locking.All of these dynamics can be found in universal model oscillators subjected to external forcing. This suggests that such oscillators can be used to accurately represent thermoacoustically self-excited combusting systems subjected to similar forcing. It also suggests that the analytical solutions to such oscillators can be used to guide the reduction and analysis of experimental or numerical data obtained from real thermoacoustic systems, and to identify effective methods for open-loop control of their dynamics.

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We investigate the evaporation dynamics of a sessile droplet of ethanol–water binary mixtures of different compositions laden with alumina nanoparticles and compare with the no-loading condition at different substrate temperatures. Shadowgraphy and infrared imaging methods are used, and the experimental images are postprocessed using a machine learning technique. We found that the loading and no-loading cases display distinct wetting and contact angle dynamics. Although the wetting diameter of a droplet decreases monotonically in the absence of loading, the droplet with 0.6 wt % nanoparticle loading remains pinned for the majority of its lifetime. The temporal variation of the normalized droplet volume in the no-loading case has two distinct slopes, with ethanol and water phases dominating the early and late stages of evaporation, respectively. The normalized droplet volume with 0.6 wt % loading displays a nearly linear behavior because of the increase in the heat transfer rate. Our results from infrared imaging reveal that a nanofluid droplet displays far richer thermal patterns than a droplet without nanoparticle loading. In nanoparticle-laden droplets, the pinning effect, as well as the resulting thermo-capillary and thermo-solutal convection, causes more intense internal mixing and a faster evaporation rate. Finally, a theoretical model is also developed that satisfactorily predicts the evaporation dynamics of binary nanofluid droplets.

Balusamy, Saravanan Cessou, Armelle Lecordier, Bertrand 8th International Symposium on Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV 09) Aug 25-28, 2009 Melbourne, AUSTRALIA SiThis paper presents a new experimental approach using PIV technique to measure the local instantaneous laminar burning velocity of a stretched premixed flame. Up to now, from experimental techniques, this physical property was only accessible in average and the instantaneous interactions of flame with flow structures, mixture variations and walls could not be considered. In the present work, the local burning velocity is measured as the difference between the local flame speed and the local fresh gas velocity at the entrance of the flame zone. Two original methods are proposed to deduce these quantities from pair of particle images. The local flame speed is measured from the distance between two successive flame positions. For the flame localization, a new extraction tool combined with a filtering technique is proposed to access to the flame front coordinates with sub-pixel accuracy. The local fresh gas velocity near the flame front is extracted from the maximum of the normal velocity profile, located within 1 mm ahead of the flame front. To achieve the required spatial resolution, a new algorithm based on adaptive interrogation window scheme has been developed by taking into account the flow and flame front topologies. The accuracy and reliability of our developments have been evaluated from two complementary approaches based, respectively, on synthetic images of particle and on the well-established configuration of outwardly propagating spherical flames. In the last part of the paper, an illustration of the potentials of our new approach is shown in the case of a laminar flame propagating through a stratified mixture