Heat Release Imaging in Turbulent Premixed Ethylene-Air Flames Near Blow-off.

The focus of this work is to visualise the regions of CHO and heat release (HR) of an unconfined turbulent premixed bluff body stabilised ethylene-air flame at conditions approaching lean blow-off using simultaneous imaging of OH- and CHO-PLIF. The HR regions are estimated from the product of the OH and CHO profiles. At conditions near blow-off, wide regions of CHO are observed inside the recirculation zone (RZ). The presence of CHO and HR inside the RZ is observed to follow fragmentation of the downstream flame parts near the top of the RZ. The presence of wide regions void of both OH and CHO inside the RZ at conditions very close to blow-off indicates the possible entrainment of un-reacted gases into the RZ. The behaviour of the lean ethylene-air flame with Lewis number ( L e) greater than 1 is compared to that of a lean methane-air flame with L e of approximately 1. For both fuels, qualitatively similar observations of flame fragmentation downstream followed by build-up of CHO and HR inside the RZ are observed at conditions near lean blow-off. Also, a similar trend of flame front curvature conditioned on HR was observed for both the ethylene-air and methane-air flames, where the magnitude of HR was observed to increase with the absolute value of curvature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]