Experimental And Numerical Contributions To Soot Production In Laminar Axisymmetric Diffusion Flames

An experimental study was performed with the main objective of characterizing soot production for different oxygen indices (OIs) in normal (NDFs) and inverse (IDFs) diffusion flames. Specific absorption-emission based methods were developed, implemented and validated to measure soot volume fraction and temperature. It was found that for IDFs, an increase on the OI produces an enhancement of soot formation but does not affect oxidation processes, leading to an increase on soot volume fraction and radiant fraction. In addition, a scaling analysis based on the smoke point (SP) resulted on a unified behavior for ethylene, propane and butane fueled NDFs in terms of flame height, soot volume fraction and radiant fraction at SP. In a second step, a numerical study was performed with the main objective of evaluating the predictive capabilities of the sectional method (SM) and three methods of moments (MOMs) for the resolution of the population balance equation (PBE) for soot particle size distribution (PSD). For this purpose, the MOMs were added to an existing parallel code for simulating laminar axisymmetric diffusion flames. The SM was able to reproduce the available experimental data whereas the MOMs were not able to predict details of soot morphology with the same level of accuracy. An analysis on the main differences between the SM and MOMs was performed. The main issue identified for the MOMs was the inability to satisfy the assumption of conservation of number density of primary particles and number of primary particles per aggregate during soot surface processes.