Combustion of fine aluminum and magnesium powders in water

Micron-sized metal powders carried by a nitrogen flow were fed along the axis of a cylindrical hydrogen/oxygen diffusion flame. The particles ignited and burned in the water vapor at approximately 2500K. Experiments were performed at atmospheric pressure. The environment in which particles burned wa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Combustion and flame 2013-10, Vol.160 (10), p.2242-2250
Main Authors: Corcoran, Amy, Mercati, Stefano, Nie, Hongqi, Milani, Massimo, Montorsi, Luca, Dreizin, Edward L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aluminum
Applied sciences
Combustion
Combustion. Flame
Correlation
Emission
Energy
Energy. Thermal use of fuels
Exact sciences and technology
Hydrogen production
Magnesium
Metal combustion
Metal powders
Miscellaneous
Particle burn time
Particle size distribution
Theoretical studies. Data and constants. Metering
Underwater propulsion
Water vapor
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Summary:Micron-sized metal powders carried by a nitrogen flow were fed along the axis of a cylindrical hydrogen/oxygen diffusion flame. The particles ignited and burned in the water vapor at approximately 2500K. Experiments were performed at atmospheric pressure. The environment in which particles burned was characterized in detail using computational fluid dynamics. The computations confirmed that the metal powders burned in water while the effect of oxygen and other oxidizing species could be neglected. Combustion was characterized experimentally for micron-sized powders of both aluminum and magnesium. Particle size distributions were measured using low-angle laser light scattering. Optical emission of the burning particles was recorded using filtered photomultiplier tubes. Measured durations of individual particle emission pulses were assumed to represent their burn times; these data were classified into logarithmically spaced time bins. The distribution of the particle burn times was correlated with their size distributions assuming that larger size particles burned longer. It was observed that correlation between the burn times, t, and particle diameters, D, can be approximately described as t∼D0.64 and t∼D0.68 for aluminum and magnesium powders, respectively. The results were compared to previous reports and possible reasons for discrepancies between the present and earlier results were discussed.
ISSN:0010-2180
1556-2921
DOI:10.1016/j.combustflame.2013.04.019