UC San Diego

Theoretical and numerical studies of laminar jet diffusion flames have been conducted in the limit of infinitely fast chemistry for unity oxygen Lewis number LO = 1, providing information on flame shapes and flame temperatures for different reactant-feed dilution, fuel Lewis number LF, and coflow-to-jet velocity ratios U0. Shvab-Zel'dovich coupling functions are used to write the conservation equations for planar and axisymmetric jet flames in the boundary-layer approximation. Specific consideration is given to the mixing-layer solution near the injector rim, where differential-diffusion effects are seen to result in the expected superadiabatic/subadiabatic temperature for LF smaller/larger than 1. These effects are more pronounced for U0 = 0 and at intermediate values of Zs. The evolution of the temperature along the flame is found to exhibit an unexpected behavior, in that irrespective of the dilution and coflow velocity the flame temperature always transitions from superadiabatic to subadiabatic when LF < 1 and from subadiabatic to superadiabatic for LF > 1. The variation with LF of the flame shape relative to the enthalpy eld is reasoned as the cause for the observed transition. Additional computations are performed for inverse diffusion flames with LO = 1 and LF ~= 1. These do not exhibit reversed differential-diffusion behaviors, indicating that the diffusivity of the abundant (co-flow) reactant is less critical than that of the deficient (central-jet) reactant.