Exploiting line-mixing effects for laser absorption spectroscopy at extreme combustion pressures

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A unique spectroscopic strategy has been developed for laser absorption sensing of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) at extreme pressures (P > 50 atm) relevant to modern combustion devices. The strategy exploits the band narrowing effects of line mixing, which acutely impact spectrally dense regions, such as bandheads, where line spacing is small. Line mixing is shown to counter collisional line-broadening effects that reduce differential absorption at elevated pressures and often limit the pressure range of laser absorption methods. In this work, the R-branch bandheads of CO and CO2, which are only observed at high temperatures relevant to combustion, are targeted near 2.3 µm and 4.2 µm, respectively. Spectral line-mixing models were developed for each bandhead region to account for the collision-induced population transfer rates between rotational energy states over a wide range of elevated temperatures and pressures. Modified-exponential-gap models using the relaxation matrix formalism were shown to capture the thermodynamic dependence of the population transfer rates and enabled scaling. Differential absorption at the bandheads was observed to increase by up to a factor of ten at high gas densities, due to line-mixing effects, enabling detection with relatively narrow-band tunable semi-conductor lasers. With refined spectroscopic models, laser absorption measurements of temperature, CO, and CO2 were demonstrated over a range of high pressures (up to 104 atm) in a sub-scale rocket combustor operated with kerosene and supercritical methane.