This study was conducted to investigate the characteristics of meso-scale combustion.The technique of electrical capacitance tomography(ECT) was used to locate flame position and monitor the effect corresponding to varied air/fuel ratio in a meso-scale combustor.Combustion phenomena including igniting,quenching and unsteady combustion have been visualized using ECT.The method of metallization protecting ECT sensor from high temperature damage and the novel calibration method adapted to ECT monitoring of unknown permittivity flame have been shown to be successful.At the same time,electrical nature of combustion and dielectric characteristics of hy-drocarbon flame were studied.The relationship between flame permittivity and state parameters of combustion gas was demonstrated preliminarily.
In order to overcome the disturbance of noise,this paper presented a method to measure two-phase flow velocity using particle swarm optimization algorithm,nonlinear blind source separation and cross correlation method.Because of the nonlinear relationship between the output signals of capacitance sensors and fluid in pipeline,nonlinear blind source separation is applied.In nonlinear blind source separation,the odd polynomials of higher order are used to fit the nonlinear transformation function,and the mutual information of separation signals is used as the evaluation function.Then the parameters of polynomial and linear separation matrix can be estimated by mutual information of separation signals and particle swarm optimization algorithm,thus the source signals can be separated from the mixed signals.The two-phase flow signals with noise which are obtained from upstream and downstream sensors are respectively processed by nonlinear blind source separation method so that the noise can be effectively removed.Therefore,based on these noise-suppressed signals,the distinct curves of cross correlation function and the transit times are obtained,and then the velocities of two-phase flow can be accurately calculated.Finally,the simulation experimental results are given.The results have proved that this method can meet the measurement requirements of two-phase flow velocity.
Three-dimensional tracking of submicron particles in flows in a micro-channel was carried out using in-line holographic microscopy.A fixed single 0.5 μm fluorescent particle was identified and isolated from dust particles or overlapped particle pair using the laser induced fluorescent(LIF) method.Then in-line microscopic holograms of the fixed single particle were obtained at different positions on the optical axis,i.e.the defocus distances.The holograms of the single particle were used as the model templates with the known defocus distances.The particles in the in-line microscopic holograms of flow in the microchannel were then identified and located to obtain their two-dimensional positions.The defocus distances of those particles were determined by matching each hologram pattern to one of the model templates obtained in the single particle test.Finally the three-dimensional position and velocity of each particle were obtained.
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel fired power plants,a range of new combustion technologies are being developed or refined,including oxy-fuel combustion,co-firing biomass with coal and fluidized bed combustion.Flame characteristics under such combustion conditions are expected to be different from those in normal air fired combustion processes.Quantified flame characteristics such as temperature distribution,oscillation frequency,and ignition volume play an important part in the optimized design and operation of the environmentally friendly power generation systems.However,it is challenging to obtain such flame characteristics particularly through a three-dimensional and non-intrusive means.Various tomography methods have been proposed to visualize and characterize flames,including passive optical tomography,laser based tomography,and electrical tomography.This paper identifies the challenges in flame tomography and reviews existing techniques for the quantitative characterization of flames.Future trends in flame tomography for industrial applications are discussed.
