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A new burner was developed in order to achieve very stable lean flames at lower equivalence ratio and higher level of turbulence intensity. The air-fuel mixing process of the current burner was controlled either by using different levels of partially premixed or by changing the turbulence generator disk slit diameter, ds. Initially, the distributions of turbulent intensity and air volume fraction inside the burner were numerically investigated using three-dimensional computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modelling. Then the lean flame stability limits corresponding to the lean natural gas (NG)/air mixture at an equivalence ratio of φ = 0.6, under five degrees of partially premixed and two turbulent generators disk slit diameters were delineated. Based on the stability limits map, laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) technique was employed for further quantitative measurements of the mixture fraction or the equivalence ratio distributions of NG/air mixture. The results indicated that the maximum burner stability for smaller ds was achieved at mixing length to diameter ratio (L/D) of 1:1, whilst for larger ds the maximum stability was achieved at L/D ratio of 2:1. Furthermore, the largest disk slit diameter yielded a homogeneous mixture fraction distribution and lower rms fluctuation, compared to that of lower disk slit diameter. Consequently, this improved the conduction effectiveness in preheating the unburned gases layers resulting in higher flame propagation speed.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. The creation of a more stable flame along with the extension of flammability limits under lean mixture combustion was the main motivation to develop a new burner design, which has been investigated in this research. The current burner configuration was utilized to create a wide range of higher turbulent intensities and to produce different degrees of mixture inhomogeneity, which acted to promote minimum pollution, highest performance and higher flame stability. The burner stability assessment was investigated using two types of fuel: natural gas (NG) and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). They were tested under different degrees of partial premixing, and two turbulence generator disks for lean mixture at an equivalence ratio of φ = 0.8 were used. Following this, the Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) technique was utilized to characterize and quantify the impact of changing the disk slit diameter on the distributions profiles of equivalence ratio or mixture fraction for a NG/air partially premixed flame. A series of homogeneous NG/air mixtures with different equivalence ratios were used to obtain the correlations between the measured emission lines of LIBS spectra and the global flame equivalence ratio. Consequently, the emission spectral lines ratios of H/N, H/O and C/N + O were utilized to predict the equivalence ratio distributions. The results demonstrated that for all of the mixing lengths, NG/air mixture with larger disk generator diameter yielded the maximum burner stability, whilst the LPG/air mixture with a larger disk generator diameter resulted in the minimum burner stability. Furthermore, the flame associated with the larger disk slit diameter had a uniform local equivalence ratio distribution and lower RMS fluctuation profiles of equivalence ratio in comparison to the lower disk slit diameter.