Experimental Study of Laminar Burning Speed for Premixed Biomass/Air Flame

Biomass has been considered as a valuable alternative fuel recently. A fundamental property of biomass/air flame, laminar burning speed, is measured in this research. Experiments have been made in a cylindrical combustion vessel with two end windows. Central ignition has been used to start the combustion process. A high-speed CMOS camera capable of taking pictures of 40,000 frames per second has been used to study morphology of flame front. Flames are initially smooth, and as pressure and flame radius increase, cracks and cells appear on the flame surface. In this paper, experimental results have only been reported for smooth flames. A multishell thermodynamic model to measure laminar burning speed of biomass/air mixture with varying CO₂ concentrations (0%–60%), based on the pressure rise data collected from a cylindrical chamber during combustion, has been developed in this paper. Burning speed has been only reported for flame radii larger than 4 cm in radius in order to have negligible stretch effect. Power law correlations, to predict burning speed of biomass/air mixtures, based on the measured burning speeds, have been developed for a range of temperatures of 300–661 K, pressures of 0.5–6.9 atmospheres, equivalence ratios of 0.8–1.2, and CO₂ concentrations 0%–60%. Moreover, the measured laminar burning speeds have been compared with simulation results using a one-dimensional steady-state laminar premixed flame program with GRI-Mech 3.0 mechanism and other available data from literatures. Comparison with existing data has been excellent.