Measurements of sooting in single droplet combustion under the normal-gravity condition

Abstract

The temporal and spatial distributions of soot volume fractions were measured for single toluene droplet flames as a function of pressure under the normal-gravity condition. In order to characterize the transient nature of the flame and sooting regions, a full-field light extinction and subsequent tomographic inversion technique was used. The reduction in sooting as a function of pressure was assessed by comparison of the maximum soot volume fractions at several vertical positions along the axis above the droplet. The maximum soot volume fraction was reduced by 70% when the pressure was reduced by 60% from 1 atm to 0.4 atm. The reduction in sooting is attributed to variation of the geometric configuration of flame which reduces the system Grashof number as well as only the change in the adiabatic flame temperature as the pressure decreases. The gravimetrically-measured total soot yield was also compared to the optically-measured soot volume fraction to obtain a correlation between the two measurements. As a result, the total soot yield was linearly proportional to the optically-measured maximum soot volume fraction and linearly reduced as the pressure decreased. Accordingly, the non-intrusive full-field light extinction-measurements were able to be calibrated not only to measure soot volume fraction, but to simultaneously evaluate the total soot yield emitted from the toluene droplet flame (which is useful in the practical application).