Flame detection on EV burner using process tomography and OH-PLIF data fusion

With increasingly urgent requirements for pollution control and energy saving, the study of low-emission and high-efficiency burners has been proposed worldwide. Among all these new technologies, swirl-induced environmental (EV) burners are outstanding with notable features, such as low emissions, particularly NOx, while maintaining a good combustion stability. In this study, an EV burner is investigated by both an ECT system and an OH-PLIF system. The aim is to detect the structure of a flame and obtain more information, for instance, OH radicals distributions about the combustion process in an EV burner. The experimental images of a flame by ECT are in good agreement with the OH radical distribution pictures captured by OH-PLIF. Visualizing flame distributions in combustion chambers would be the first and necessary step to more difficult tasks such as detecting the locations of poor combustion zones in a combustion chamber that tend to reduce the combustion efficiency, and the locations with excessively high temperature that would generate high concentration of nitric oxides (NOx) gases.