Effect of turbulence on extinction of counterflow diffusion flame

Abstract

A laminar counterflow diffucion flame established in the forward stagnation region of a porous cylinderhas been used widely for the laminar flame studies. In the present study, this flame was applied to investigating the extinction of a diffusion flame due to air stream turbulence. Propane or methane was ejected from a 30-mm porous cylinder. The turbulence was given to the counterflowing air stream by perforated plates. The results of this study show that the air stream turbulence causes large-scale distortions with small amplitude on the apparently laminar diffusion flame, and the time-averaged thickness of this flame is three times as large as the purely laminar flame. Even if the air stream becomes turbulent, there exists a critical stagnation velocity gradient beyond which the flame can never be stabilized, however large the fuel ejection velocity is. Local extinction near the stagnation region always leads to global extinction of the whole flame. As expected, the critical velocity gradient decreases as the turbulence intensity increases. This flame is subjected to the sum of the bulk stretch rate exerted by the mean flow and the turbulent stretch rate exerted by small eddies of Kolmogorov scale. The critical total stretch rate at which the extinction occurs is nearly constant for each fuel for all turbulence conditions tested in the present study and coincides with the critical stagnation velocity gradient of the laminar diffusion flame, that is, the total stretch rate without turbulence. This fact suggests that large-scale eddies are not so effective for the local extinction and that the chemical reaction that occurs in molecular scale is not affected by small eddies of the Kolmogorov scale.