Data driven forecast of droplet combustion

Abstract

The characteristics of a diffusion flame resulting from the gasification of a condensed fuel are predicted from the synthesis of simple models and data. Combustion of a droplet in microgravity is used as a canonical configuration to illustrate the methodology. The simplicity of the spherical configuration and the detail of the measurements make the available experimental data ideal for this study. The approach followed combines the classical analytical solution first proposed by Spalding to describe the condensed phase gasification with a numerical method that describes the gas phase. Available data on flame geometry and regression rates are used to initialize the model and produce adequate predictions of the time evolution of all relevant variables. The method was shown to make proper predictions under numerous configurations and with very small computational cost.