Quantitative experimental and model-based imaging of infrared radiation intensity from turbulent reacting flows

Radiation transfer in turbulent reacting and non-reacting flows is important in many applications related to combustion, energy, power and propulsion, and atmospheric sciences. Advanced measurements and computations of radiation transfer in turbulent reacting flows have applications in improving energy efficiencies, managing emissions to the environment, and controlling radiation from unwanted fires. Emerging large-scale computations can benefit from the development of highly scalable quantitative visualization methods for volume rendering and displaying three-dimensional time-dependent results in the form of planar images with consideration of time and length scales that vary over orders of magnitude. Experimental and theoretical methods for quantitatively comparing measured and modeled time-dependent images of the infrared radiation intensity from reacting flows are developed and applied to a range of example problems. Quantitative images of the radiation intensity from bluff body stabilized laminar diffusion flames and turbulent jet diffusion flames are acquired using a high speed infrared camera. Results of the solution to the radiative transfer equation are rendered in the form of planar images using a narrowband radiation model with computed scalar values. Quantitative comparisons of the measured and modeled images of the radiation intensity from the reacting flows are shown to be useful for prompting improvements in combustion and radiation models and interpreting distributions of gas temperatures, gas species concentrations, and particulate volume fractions. The application of emerging imaging techniques to direct numerical simulation and large eddy simulation results is defining a new field and is one of the novel contributions of this work