A burner to emulate condensed phase fuels

• A gas burner emulates the burning of condensed-phase fuels.
• Hypothesize for emulation is based on four material properties.
• The burner can also define the limits for ignition and extinction.

A gas-fueled burner with heat flux gages embedded in its porous surface is used to emulate condensed fuel flames. The measured heat flux, the flow rate of the fuel/inert mixture, and the burner surface temperature allow the emulation of the burning characteristics of condensed fuels. The burner is named the Burning Rate Emulator (BRE). It can burn a gaseous fuel at an effective heat of gasification matching the actual heat of gasification of condensed-phase fuels. It also can match other characteristics of the condensed-phase fuel by careful selection of certain properties of the gaseous fuel. These properties are the heat of combustion, the effective heat of gasification, the surface temperature, and the laminar smoke point. The BRE is shown to reasonably emulate steady burning of methanol, heptane, polyoxymethylene (POM) and polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) burning in 50 mm diameter pools. It also can be used to emulate ignition and extinction. The results can be used to predict behavior at other conditions, such as burning with external radiant heating. The BRE can be extended to emulate steady burning under diverse conditions. The plausibility of the BRE is demonstrated and its limitations and difficulties are discussed. In particular, the difficulty of dealing with the actual surface heat flux distribution is examined. In general, the paper intends to demonstrate the attributes of a BRE.