Experimental study of premixed flames in intense isotropic turbulence,

A methodology for investigating premixed turbulent flames propagating in intense isotropic turbulence has been developed. The burner uses a turbulence generator developed by Videto and Santavicca and the flame is stabilized by weak-swirl generated by air injectors. This setup produces stable premixed turbulent flames under a wide range of mixture conditions and turbulence intensities. The experiments are designed to investigate systematically the changes in flame structures for conditions which can be classified as wrinkled laminar flames, corrugated flames, and flames with distributed reaction zones. Laser Doppler anemometry and Rayleigh scattering techniques are used to determine the turbulence and scalar statistics. In the intense turbulence, the flames are found to produce very little changes in the mean and rms velocities. Their flame speed increase linearly with turbulence intensity as for wrinkled laminar flames. The Rayleigh scattering probability density functions (pdfs) for flames within the distributed reaction zone regime are distinctly bimodal. The probabilities of the reacting states (i.e. contributions from within the reaction zone) is not higher than those of wrinkled laminar flame. These results show that there is no drastic changes in flame structures at Karlovitz number close to unity. This suggest that the Klimov Williams criterion underpredicts the resilience of wrinkled flamelets to intense turbulence.