Experimental investigation of three-dimensional flame-front structure in premixed turbulent combustion—I: hydrocarbon/air bunsen flames

OH concentrations and three-dimensional gradients of the reaction progress variable have been measured in turbulent liquefied petroleum gas/air and compressed natural gas/air premixed flames stabilized on a Bunsen-type burner with a combined two-sheet Rayleigh scattering and planar LIF-OH imaging technique. The progress variable is observed to undergo a transition from lamella-like to non-flamelet front structure with increasing turbulence. This is consistent with the recently proposed change of the combustion regimes from complex-strain to turbulent flame front regime on a recently proposed premixed combustion diagram. The anisotropy of local flame-front orientation in three-dimensional space is explained by the forward propagation ability of the planar turbulent flame brush. Weighting functions have thus been derived for the isotropic pdf distributions of the in-plane and out-of-plane orientation angles to agree better with the experimental data. A linear scaling is found between the overall flame surface area and the turbulence intensity normalized by the laminar burning velocity. However, flames with excess backward-facing flame fronts do not comply with this linear relationship, showing enhanced flame surface folding. The thin-flame assumption breaks down when non-flamelet broadening effects become important, although the pdf’s of the progress variable are still bimodal-like. Non-unity Lewis-number combined curvature effects are evident for LPG/air flames of weak turbulence, in that the conditional mean scalar dissipation increases steadily from the unburnt to burnt side across the flame brush. A consistent correlation exists between the Favre-averaged scalar dissipation and progress variable variance. This implies that small-scale scalar dissipation of local flame-fronts is linked to large-scale scalar fluctuations. Sub- or super-flamelet OH concentration is found in lean LPG/air or CNG/air premixed flames, respectively, and occurs in line with a positive or negative correlation between OH concentrations and magnitudes of the progress variable gradient.