Experimental and kinetic modeling study of the combustion of Jet-A and S-8 fuels in laminar premixed flames

Laminar flame speeds and Markstein lengths of Jet-A/air, and S-8/air flames at an elevated initial temperature and various initial pressures were measured using spherically expanding premixed flames. The experimental facility has been developed to study the combustion behaviors of high-boiling-point and low-vapor-pressure liquid fuels. The experiment used a spherical combustion chamber housed inside a customized oven, which provides a uniform temperature distribution inside the chamber for fuel evaporation. Two different fuel injection systems – the partial pressure method and the volume method, were used to measure the fuel to air ratio of the mixture, and the flame speeds from these methods were compared. There was large discrepancy in the flame speeds between the two methods for multi-component fuel, such as Jet-A. The measured flame speed data of Jet-A/air and S-8/air flames were compared to those by other researchers as well as numerical simulation results using several existing kinetic mechanisms and surrogate models. The results show that the flame speed data in present measurements were slightly lower than those by other researchers using the counterflow flame methods. Moreover, the results show the large discrepancies between present measured flame speed data and numerically calculated data. The Markstein lengths of heavy hydrocarbons including Jet-A and S-8 show that the value decreases as the equivalence ratio. The flame instabilities were observed for the flames with negative Markstein lengths. The pressure increase decreases the flame speeds throughout the stoichiometory. The pressure increase also decreases the Markstein lengths throughout the stoichiometory, and enhances the hydrodynamic instability on the flame