Effect of Combustion Reaction Based on Capacitive Discharge Ignition in Air-Propane Equivalence Ratio

Abstract

The main purpose of this research work is to demonstrate the effective plasma of capacitive discharge ignition (CDI) comparing with conventional ignition discharge. A constant volume combustion chamber (CVCC) with a volume of 450 cm3 is developed to study thermochemical combustion process. The experimental conditions set 2, 3 and 4 bar for initial pressure, 363 K of chamber temperature, 1.00, 1.25 and 1.50 mm of electrodes gap, 1 ms of discharge time, 100 mJ in spark energy and λ = 1.0 to 1.7 in air-C3H8 equivalence ratio. In order to validate the collected data and verify the repeatability of experimental study, the experiments are repeated 10 times. The discharge effect of CDI is demonstrated to significantly enhance the combustion reaction, flame propagation and internal flame kernel comparing with conventional ignition discharge. Due to electron impact dissociation (EID) and breakdown strength (BS) increases, the effective plasma of CDI is shown to effectively propagate the flame kernel under the combustion reaction more than conventional ignition discharge inside CVCC. Consequently, the combustion reaction by CDI is verified that in CVCC diluted with the rarefied air-C3H8 equivalence ratios, the converting efficiency is much more active than conventional ignition energy.