Research on Combustion

Abstract

No one is better qualified than Prof. W. A. Bone to give an account of “Fifty Years of Combustion Research” the title of his William Young Memorial Lecture, delivered to the North British Association of Gas Managers on September 12. The account gives a readable and comprehensive story mainly of the work due to the late Prof. H. B. Dixon and his school, and not least of Prof. Bone himself and his pupils. The lecture included some of the more recent observations on the combustion of gases at very high initial pressures, with activation of nitrogen, the description of some of the curious phenomena such as the ‘spin’ of the flame head in the detonation wave observations calling for remarkable achievements in highspeed photography. The existence recently observed of double ranges of ignition temperatures of gases with an intervening ‘inert’ zone of temperature emphasises the complexity of the process of ignition. The ‘chain theory’ which has been so extensively used to account for combustion phenomena is held to be not ‘mere moonshine’ but to merit critical reception when capable of being harmonised with experiment. Prof. Bone closes with the insistence on the necessity of perpetual experimentation, for as Priestley said, “Speculations without experiments have always been the bane of natural philosophy”.