Combustion & flame diagnostics

Scope

This is the oldest strand of the energy work and the one with the longest documented record. Its unifying question is what happens to a fuel droplet or particle that is not a clean liquid — an emulsion of oil, water and coal, or a slurry of solids in a carrier — between atomization and burnout, and what can be measured about a flame without disturbing it.

Selected research history

Completed work carried out at Adelphi University. This program predates the Institute, in most cases by decades, and is described here because it establishes the research background rather than as Institute activity.

Coal/water/oil emulsions as a clean liquid fuel, 1976–1980

An Adelphi University program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy examined whether an emulsion of coal, water and oil could serve as a clean liquid fuel. It produced a series of interim reports and a final report between 1976 and 1980, all deposited with the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information, together with an addendum in 1980. A separate DOE study under contract DE-AC22-79PC10328, reported in interim report DOE/PC/10328-T1, examined coal desulfurization during the combustion of coal/oil/water emulsions; John P. Dooher is identified on that report as principal investigator.

Two peer-reviewed papers came out of the program. Formation of water/oil emulsions with steam-atomizing burner appeared in Fuel in 1978 (doi:10.1016/0016-2361(78)90181-3), and Combustion studies of water/oil emulsion on a commercial boiler using No. 2 oil and low and high sulphur No. 6 oil followed in 1980 (doi:10.1016/0016-2361(80)90039-3). The second is notable for having been run on a commercial boiler rather than a bench rig.

The Adelphi–Goddard Emulsified Fuel Project, 1977

A NASA technical report dated 18 August 1977 documents this project under contract NAS 5-23688, carried out at the Center for Energy Studies, Adelphi University, with John Dooher named as Project Director. NASA NTRS record 19780008965

Optical flame diagnostics: the Intelligent Flame Analysis System

Adelphi University describes the IFAS as “a flame analysis and diagnostic tool developed at Adelphi” that “uses a unique combination of spectral imaging techniques and special computer software to determine combustion gas distributions in furnace flames”, and states that undergraduate students work with it under the direction of Dr John P. Dooher. Adelphi’s page frames the department’s energy work — flame analysis and diagnostics, and coal–oil mixtures as energy sources — as notable past research.

The IFAS is an Adelphi University instrument. It is not an Institute facility, the Institute does not hold it, and no claim of access to it is made here. It is described on this page because optical flame diagnostics is one of the research area’s methods and because Adelphi’s own page documents the direction of that work. Adelphi University, Physics Research

Combustion of slurry fuels

Work on the atomization and combustion of coal slurries connects this area to rheology and multiphase systems and to energy physics: the 2005 paper in Atomization and Sprays and the 2003 DOE/NETL phenomenological model report are catalogued under rheology, and the gasification work under energy physics, but the physics is continuous across the three.

Continuing research interests

• Droplet and particle combustion in multiphase and emulsified fuels, theory and experiment.
• Non-intrusive optical and spectral diagnostics of furnace flames, and inference of gas distributions from spectral imaging.
• Formation and control of pollutants from the combustion of compound fuels.
• Combustion behavior of biomass and biomass–coal mixtures.

Related publications

Ten catalogued items are classified under combustion, comprising the DOE report series, the two Fuel papers and the 1979 desulfurization report. Filter the publications index by combustion.