Abstract
We present here a study of laser ignition in a rapid compression machine (RCM). Laser induced ignition of natural gas-air mixtures at various test conditions was investigated. An Nd:YAG laser (1064 nm, 12 ns pulse duration) was employed as the laser source. Methaneair mixtures ranging from stoichiometric conditions to equivalence ratio of 0.4 were ignited using the laser as part of a lean limit study where the fuel-energy was kept constant for all cases. A study of minimum laser spark energy (MSE) and minimum ignition energy (MIE) was also conducted. We show that both MSE and MIE exhibit a stochastic behavior and, as a consequence, results can only be interpreted statistically. For our conditions, we found MSE at 90 % probability of MSE90=2.3 mJ. The MIE study was conducted at an equivalence ratio of φ=0.4 yielding an MIE (90% probability) of MIE90=7.2 mJ.
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