Design and development of laboratory scale flame tube apparatus

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt made in design and development of laboratory scale flame tube apparatus is brought out. Flame tube enables in measurement of laminar flame velocity (SL) – a fundamental combustion parameter. Flame velocity of the given air to fuel mixture possesses information such as thermal diffusivity, exothermicity and reactivity of the fuel. The knowledge of flame velocity is quite important in the domain of design of combustion systems (like engines and burners), modeling of turbulent combustion and validation of chemical kinetic mechanisms. The reported work also involves, design of mixing chamber for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) fuel. LPG was considered as the basic fuel in the present work due to its abundant availability and for economic reasons. Laminar flame velocity was calculated with reference to a flame front propagation distance to the time taken by the flame front to propagate the set distance. The experimentally measured average laminar flame velocity in the present work was found to be 0.56 m/sec. However, the reported value is 21.4% higher at stoichiometry as compared to LPG flame velocity reported in the literature. The present study has successfully showcased a workable system of flame tube apparatus. However, the benchmarking of the flame velocities at various equivalence ratios is a part of future work.