DDT run-up distance in an obstructed tube

Abstract

Self-luminous high-speed photography was used to study flame acceleration and deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT) in a clear polycarbonate round tube equipped with orifice plates. The 288 cm long, 7.6 cm inner-diameter tube was equipped with equally spaced 50% and 75% area-blockage orifice plates. The primary test mixture was stoichiometric ethylene–oxygen diluted with varying amounts of nitrogen, and the initial pressure was varied between 5 and 90 kPa. Tests were also performed with stoichiometric hydrogen–oxygen with large argon dilution to study the effect of detonation cell structure regularity. High-speed video showed that the initial DDT always occurred following shock reflection off an obstacle, allowing an accurate determination of the DDT run-up distance. Soot foils were used to measure cell size at the end of the obstacle-free tube. A correlation for flame acceleration to one-half the Chapman–Jouguet detonation velocity (VCJ) predicted the measured DDT run-up distance successfully for the most reactive mixture conditions. However, the measured DDT run-up distance increasingly deviated from the correlation with decreasing initial pressure, significantly under predicting the run-up distance at the DDT limit. A correlation for the DDT run-up distance was proposed based on the concept of flame acceleration to one-half VCJ followed by an induction phase that ends with the transition to detonation. For a given tube and obstacle configuration, the flame acceleration distance depends on the flame properties, and the DDT induction distance depends on the properties that quantify the detonation length-scale and stability.