Effect of Coflow Temperature on the Characteristics of Diesel Spray Flames and its Transient HC Distribution under Atmospheric Conditions

A Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) Combustor enables the investigation of stabilization mechanisms in an environment that decouples the turbulent chemical kinetics from the complex recirculating flow. Previous studies on combustion of the low-pressure fuel jets in the Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) showed non-linear effect of coflow temperature on autoignition delay and the randomness of autoignition sites. In this work, a diesel spray is injected into the CATA with the injection pressure at 20MPa from a single-hole injector and the autoignition and combustion process of the spray is recorded by a high-speed camera video.

The multipoint autoignition of diesel spray is observed in the CATA and the subsequent combustion process is analyzed. The results show that autoignition phenomenon plays an important role in the stabilization of the lifted flames of diesel spray under low coflow temperature. Beyond this, the transient HC distributions of the diesel spray were measured by the HFR500 made by the Cambustion LTD. The effects of coflow temperature on the autoignition characteristics, flame liftoff height and transient HC distribution are also presented and discussed. These results could be used as a database for validating the combustion models for future work.