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We studied the boundary layer effects on flame temperature measurements using line-of-sight (LOS) absorption spectroscopy. The primary objective is to quantify the measurement uncertainty of the LOS-determined temperature, which is influenced by the thermal and species boundary layers existing in standard laminar premixed flames. The boundary layer thickness (δ), central flame temperature (Tc) and species concentration (Xc) are the major factors investigated in this work. Typical absorption lines of H2O in the wavelength range of 1.4–2.9 μm were examined under different boundary layer conditions (δ/L = 0–50%, L is the optical path length above the flame; Tc = 1400–2200 K; and Xc = 14–20%). As a result, the thermal boundary layer is observed to contribute mainly to the temperature deviation of the LOS measurement, which increases with δ and Tc. In comparison, the variation of Xc between 14% and 20% has a negligible effect on the temperature measurement in the presence of both thermal and species boundary layers. A systematical investigation of all the selected line pairs reveals that a properly selected line pair reduces the temperature deviation by a maximum of 16.8% under typical laminar flame conditions. The particular line pair centered at 4029.52 cm−1 and 4030.73 cm−1, which could be detected by a single tunable semiconductor laser, is recommended for the LOS temperature measurement over a temperature range of 1400–2200 K. Finally, we performed a case study of five representative temperature measurements in laminar flames and successfully corrected the LOS-determined temperature by taking into account the boundary layer effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report a tomographic absorption spectroscopy (TAS) study of water vapor transport in a laminar jet issuing into the ambient. The jet was generated using compressed dry air that was straightened by a honeycomb and a smooth contraction nozzle. A TAS scheme using the water vapor in the ambient as absorbing species and the absorption line near 1368.598 nm was proposed to study the H2O transport in the laminar jet with an inverse concentration gradient. One-dimensional tomography was conducted at various heights above the nozzle, and the results were validated by the predictions from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Particularly, the variations in the concentration gradient in the shear layer at different heights were captured. The 2D distribution of water concentration in the dry laminar jet was obtained experimentally. The present study shows that TAS has great potential in the research of mass transfer and scalar field of gaseous flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the influence of absorption line selection on the tomographic results for high-temperature flames by numerical and experimental methods. Different combinations of infrared H2O absorption transitions are utilized with the Tikhonov-regularized Abel inversion to reconstruct the radial distribution of temperature and H2O concentration in a flat flame. It is shown that besides using the mathematical algorithm such as regularization, selecting a line pair with a large Δ E ″ (>1390 cm−1) also reduces the reconstruction uncertainty at 300–2000 K. In this study, a proper selection of absorption line pairs reduces the reconstruction uncertainty by 25% at the same level of noise. The line pair of H2O transitions at 4029.524 cm−1 and 4030.729 cm−1 is recommended for the tomography of high-temperature flames at 1000–3000 K, whereas the line pair of 7185.597 cm−1 and 7444.352 cm−1 can be used at 300–1000 K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the first demonstration of heterodyne phase-sensitive dispersion spectroscopy (HPSDS) for the simultaneous temperature and H2O concentration measurements in combustion environments. Two continuous-wave distributed-feedback quantum cascade lasers (DFB-QCLs) at 5.27 and 10.53 µm were used to exploit the strong H2O transitions (1897.52 and 949.53 cm−1) at high temperatures. The injection current of each QCL was modulated at sub-GHz or GHz to generate the three-tone radiation and the dispersion signal was detected by the radio-frequency down-conversion heterodyning. The peak-to-peak ratio of the two H2O dispersion spectra exhibits a monotonic relationship with temperature over the temperature range of 1000-3000 K, indicating the capability of performing two-line thermometry using laser dispersion spectroscopy. We measured the temperatures of CH4/air flames at different equivalence ratios (Φ = 0.8-1.2), yielding a good agreement with the corresponding thermocouple measurements. In addition, one-dimensional kinetic modeling coupled with a detailed chemical kinetic mechanism (GRI 3.0) was conducted to compare with the measured H2O concentrations using HPSDS. Finally, we demonstrated HPSDS is immune to optical power fluctuations by measuring the dispersion spectra at varied incident laser powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]