Stability characteristics and flame structure of low swirl burner

Low swirl burner provides stable lifted flames for fundamental studies of flame structure and turbulence/chemistry interaction in well defined boundary conditions. In the present study the stability characteristics of the burner have been investigated with four tangential jets at the same stoichiometry as the main jet. Two different burner nozzles with 40 mm and 53.5 mm diameters have been used for the stability measurements. In addition, a combined two-dimensional Rayleigh/LIPF-OH technique has been applied for simultaneous measurements of temperature and OH-radical for reaction zone and flame front investigation. Three flames have been selected near extinction for detailed measurements. The data show that the relation between of the main jet velocity, U, and the velocity of the four tangential jets, u, is linear. For the present data set with the nozzles investigated the linear trend can lead to an almost constant ratio of UD/u as 5.08 mm with D as the nozzle diameter of the burner. The flame structure varies from corrugated to highly wrinkle according to the turbulence level. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.