Experimental Study on the Combustion Characteristics of Liquid Fuel in the Straight Tubes

Abstract

This study investigates combustion characteristics of liquid hydrocarbon fuel (n-heptane, c7h16) under different operating conditions. In the paper we designed a burner consisting of a stainless steel capillary which is used to dump the fuel and a larger stainless steel tube (or quartz tube) used as a combustion chamber. The inner diameter (ID) of the capillary is 0.24 mm, the inner and external diameter of the larger tube is 4 and 6 mm, respectively. According to the experimental results, the combustion process reaches a stable status after about 100 s. Wall temperature distribution and combustion products are analyzed under conditions with different equivalence ratios, gas flow velocities and materials. As equivalence ratio (ER) whose range is in 0.56–1.08 increases, the wall temperature declines, and wall temperature gradient increases slightly. The range of gas flow velocity is in 0.6–1 m/s, the overall trend of wall temperature distribution is the second point from left boundary as a line, the wall temperature distribution of the four points in the right side increases with the flow velocity increasing, but the left point is rapidly declining. When the burner made of stainless steel, the wall temperature distribution varies slightly due to the larger thermal conductivity of stainless steel than that of quartz, which makes the heat transfer in stainless steel faster and the temperature distribution is more uniform. The thermodynamic calculation software is also used to study the compositions of combustion products. In a word, this structure of the burner shows poor combustion characteristics, we should change the structure and the experimental conditions to achieve better combustion characteristics in the future.