Ignition and combustion of a single aluminum particle in hot gas flow

Abstract

For simulating the aggregated aluminum bulks on the burning surface of solid propellants, large aluminum particles (40–160 µm) are used in this work. The isolated aluminum particles are ignited in hot oxidizing gas. Based on the bright-spot diameter profiles and the known respective reaction mechanisms, the total ignition and combustion process of aluminum particle can be divided into three stages, namely, pre-heating, ignition and combustion. The initial and bright-spot diameters of the aluminum particle are measured directly from the images by using the in-house automated data processing routines. Ignition delay time, ti, and combustion time, tc, are also obtained by post-processing the sequential images and can be associated with the particle diameters, D, in the form of ti = aD + b and tc = αD, respectively. The changing trends of ignition delay time and combustion time with the effective oxidizer mole fraction in the range of 22.8%–49.1% are distinctly different. The oxidizing environments with a high effective oxidizer mole fraction can result in short combustion time but long ignition delay time. For small particles (40–110 µm), the environmental effective oxidizer mole fraction exerts a limited effect on the sum of ignition delay time and combustion time, which indicates total time. By considering the effects of particle sizes and effective oxidizer mole fractions of environments, the percentages of ignition delay time in the total time are analyzed. These results suggest that with the goal of decreasing the total time, suitable methods can be employed for different conditions. Furthermore, we observe and discuss the phenomenon of aluminum particle microexplosion in an environment with high effective oxidizer mole fraction, which decreases particle combustion time by a large margin.