Development of an aerosol shock tube for kinetic studies of low-vapor-pressure fuels

A new experimental flow facility, an aerosol shock tube, has been developed to enable studies of shock wave interactions with liquid aerosols, including droplet evaporation kinetics and subsequent chemical reaction of the vapor. This technique provides a uniform spatial distribution of aerosol in the shock tube, which ensures well-behaved shock-induced flows, and a narrow micrometer-sized aerosol size distribution that rapidly evaporates. These two features enable quantitative shock tube investigation of the chemistry of high-concentration vapor mixtures of low-vapor-pressure practical fuels and fuel surrogates. In the present experiments, the incident shock wave is used to vaporize the fuel droplets, and the reflected shock wave is used to induce ignition. We report here the first aerosol shock tube ignition delay time measurements of n-dodecane/O2/argon and JP-7/O2/argon mixtures. The measurements are found to be consistent with those made in our heated shock tube facility.