Uncertainty Quantification of Time-Dependent Quantities in a System with Adjustable Level of Smoothness

We summarise the results of a computational study involved with Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in a benchmark turbulent burner flame simulation. UQ analysis of this simulation enables one to analyse the convergence performance of one of the most widely-used uncertainty propagation techniques, Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) at varying levels of system smoothness. This is possible because in the burner flame simulations, the smoothness of the time-dependent temperature, which is the study's QoI is found to evolve with the flame development state. This analysis is deemed important as it is known that PCE cannot accurately surrogate non-smooth QoIs and thus perform convergent UQ. While this restriction is known and gets accounted for, there is no understanding whether there is a quantifiable scaling relationship between the PCE's convergence metrics and the level of QoI's smoothness. It is found that the level of QoI-smoothness can be quantified by its standard deviation allowing to observe the effect of QoI's level of smoothness on the PCE's convergence performance. It is found that for our flow scenario, there exists a power-law relationship between a comparative parameter, defined to measure the PCE's convergence performance relative to Monte Carlo sampling, and the QoI's standard deviation, which allows us to make a more weighted decision on the choice of the uncertainty propagation technique.

Research of Mechanism of Fire Protection with Wood Lacquer

The results of researches of wood burning parameters and influence of fire-retardant substances on them are given. Studies have shown that the process of heat insulation of a wooden structure is the formation of soot-like products on the surface of natural combustible material. Under the action of the burner flame on the protected sample treated with impregnating solutions based on a mixture of ammonium phosphate with antiseptic, the temperature of gaseous combustion products was 230 oC, and weight loss did not exceed 9%, while wood treated with a composition of urea and phosphoric acids and starch showed temperature of 160 oС with a weight loss of 3.6%. It is established that fire protection by coatings provides a low rate of burnout of wood samples and with increasing temperature exposure and translates into a non-flammable material that does not spread the flame on the surface.

Experimental Investigation on the Effects of the Geometry of the Pilot Burner on Main Flame

Various kinds of pilot burners were experimentally investigated to examine the effects of their geometry and their location relative to the main burner of a real size combustor. In addition, a wide range of fuel equivalence ratios were investigated to analyze the feasibility of the novel pilot burner for the conventional burner application. From the results, it is shown that the novel pilot burner with multi air holes had a thin, straight, long and stable pilot flame, while the conventional pilot burner had a thick, lifted, short and unstable flame. It is also shown that the novel pilot burner with an upper air flow hole had a straight pilot flame which led to less thermal damage to the burner combustor. This study suggests that not only pilot burner flame shape but also the vertical location of the pilot burner from the main burner combustor has a significant effect on combustor durability.

3D infrared thermospectroscopic imaging

This work reports a multispectral tomography technique in transmission mode (called 3DITI for 3D Infrared Thermospectroscopic Imaging) based on a middle wavelength infrared (MWIR) focal plane array. This technique relies on an MWIR camera (1.5 to 5.5 μm) used in combination with a multispectral IR monochromator (400 nm to 20 μm), and a sample mounted on a rotary stage for the measurement of its transmittance at several angular positions. Based on the projections expressed in terms of a sinogram, spatial three-dimensional (3D) cubes (proper emission and absorptivity) are reconstructed using a back-projection method based on inverse Radon transform. As a validation case, IR absorptivity tomography of a reflective metallic screw is performed within a very short time, i.e., shorter than 1 min, to monitor 72 angular positions of the sample. Then, the absorptivity and proper emission tomographies of a butane-propane-air burner flame and microfluidic perfluoroalkoxy (PFA) tubing filled with water and ethanol are obtained. These unique data evidence that 3D thermo-chemical information in complex semi-transparent media can be obtained using the proposed 3DITI method. Moreover, this measurement technique presents new problems in the acquisition, storage and processing of big data. In fact, the quantity of reconstructed data can reach several TB (a tomographic sample cube of 1.5 × 1.5 × 3 cm3 is composed of more than 1 million pixels per wavelength).