Effects of confinement on detonation in H2–O2 mixture with transverse concentration gradient

Abstract

Since hydrogen has wide flammability limit and low ignition energy, it could be easily ignited and be easy for the transition to a detonation, leading to extremely serious impacts in explosion accidents or extremely high combustion effeciency in the propulsion. In the field of explosion accidents and the combustion chamber of propulsion systems, hydrogen mixtures are more likely to be highly non-uniform and a detonation usually propagates in a non-homogeneous medium. The work studies behaviors of detonations in non-homogenous medium by a high-resolution simulations. We widen computational domain and steepen the gradient to weaken the role of transverse wave on cellular detonations propagating in the medium with transverse concentration gradient and to reveal the interaction of longitudinal shock with reaction wave. The results show that characteristics of detonations in nonuniform medium is controlled by coupling role of gradient and confinement. As a domain is sufficient wide, the reflection wave is rather weak so that the detonation takes on galloping propagation, with a single-head mode. As the width is mediate, detonation cell takes on highly irregularity, similar to that of highly unstable detonation. However, in the narrow domain, steepening gradient plays a key role while confinement becomes minor in detonation propagation.