A new proposal for analyzing combustion process stability based on the Hamming distance

In this paper, the concentration of soot during controlled combustion is analyzed using two fuels: acetylene (AC) and natural gas (NG). The stability was evaluated within the spatio-temporal standards generated by the system evolution, which was based on the measuring technique known as the Hamming distance (Hd). It was observed that Hd presented a transient state for AC at a 21% oxygen concentration for small time units and achieved a medium equilibrium value (Hd=0.035), showing a significant increase in flame oxidation during combustion and ideal soot formation. For NG, at all oxygen concentrations, there was a tendency toward flame oxidation and an increase in soot formation, which suggests that Hd oscillates without a defined value with small pulses over time, indicating a decrease in flame temperature.