Flow stabilized porous heterogeneous combustor. Part II: Operational parameters and the acoustic emission

Heterogeneous combustion is an advanced combustion technique, which incorporates a highly porous ceramic media into the combustion chamber, and enables the flame to propagate within the pores of the ceramic media. Heat exchange between the solid and gas phases within the combustion chamber can enable a flame to exist that is highly resilient to momentary disruptions in reactant flow rates while also enabling localized temperatures to be in excess of the adiabatic flame temperature, a phenomena known as superadiabatic combustion. While beneficial to performance, the incorporation of the solid into the combustion chamber greatly complicates observations and understanding of the combustion phenomena occurring within the voids and on the surface of the solid media, therefore, development of non-invasive and low cost instrumentation is always a priority to get a better understanding of the phenomena occurring within the combustion chamber. Within this work, a novel instrumentation technique, acoustic emission profiles obtained by collecting the noise during heterogeneous combustion, is used to measure characteristics of the flame, in addition to the optical characterization by CCD camera and the thermal characterization by thermocouples to characterize the performance of newly developed heterogeneous porous combustor.