Modern combustion strategies such as flue gas recirculation, oxy-fuel combustion, and exhaust gas recirculation are increasingly being adopted in an effort to decrease harmful emissions such as NOx and soot. In many cases, insight can be gained by approximating aspects of these complicated combustion systems with analogs such as fairly simple quasi-2D flames. One such system, the Linear Hencken Burner was built previously in the Gonzaga Clean Combustion lab and used to examine mixtures of CO2 and propane systems – this work was conducted in collaboration with a GU student co-author.
That earlier work utilized passive soot pyrometry for flame temperatures, but this technique has certain drawbacks and so the present proposal seeks to incorporate a tunable laser diode absorption spectroscopy (TLDAS) system into the existing flame diagnostics. These TLDAS systems are much more accurate and require less calibration than soot pyrometry methods. TLDAS systems can also be used in low-soot situations such as those where the combustion environment has high percentages of methane and even hydrogen, which are the targets of the next experimental campaign in the Clean Combustion Lab.
This work extends from previous efforts with GU students, who as part of their senior design, converted a gasoline engine to run on a mixture of hydrogen and methane. This project was presented at the 2023 Western States Section of the Combustion Institute.
