Determination of the emissivity, for total radiation, of small diameter platinum-10% rhodium wires in the temperature range 600-1450 C

A novel multi-jet burner for hot flue gases of wide range of temperatures and compositions for optical diagnostics of solid fuels gasification/combustion

A novel multi-jet burner was built to provide one-dimensional laminar flat flames with a wide range of variable parameters for multipurpose quantitative optical measurements. The burner is characterized by two independent plenum chambers, one supporting a matrix of 181 laminar jet flames and the other supporting a co-flow from a perforated plate with small holes evenly distributed among the jets. A uniform rectangular burned gas region of 70 mm × 40 mm can be generated, with a wide range of temperatures and equivalence ratios by controlling independently the gas supplies to the two plenum chambers. The temperature of the hot gas can be adjusted from 1000 K to 2000 K with different flame conditions. The burner is designed to seed additives in gas or liquid phase to study homogeneous reactions. The large uniform region can be used to burn solid fuels and study heterogeneous reactions. The temperature was measured using two-line atomic fluorescence thermometry and the temperature profile at a given height above the burner was found to be flat. Different types of optical diagnostic techniques, such as line of sight absorption or laser-induced fluorescence, can be easily applied in the burner, and as examples, two typical measurements concerning biomass combustion are demonstrated.

Heat-conduction error of temperature sensors in a fluid flow with nonuniform and unsteady temperature distribution

In temperature measurement of non-isothermal fluid flows by a contact-type temperature sensor, heat conduction along the sensor body can cause significant measurement error which is called "heat-conduction error." The conventional formula for estimating the heat-conduction error was derived under the condition that the fluid temperature to be measured is uniform. Thus, if we apply the conventional formula to a thermal field with temperature gradient, the heat-conduction error will be underestimated. In the present study, we have newly introduced a universal physical model of a temperature-measurement system to estimate accurately the heat-conduction error even if a temperature gradient exists in non-isothermal fluid flows. Accordingly, we have been able to successfully derive a widely applicable estimation and/or evaluation formula of the heat-conduction error. Then, we have verified experimentally the effectiveness of the proposed formula using the two non-isothermal fields-a wake flow formed behind a heated cylinder and a candle flame-whose fluid-dynamical characteristics should be quite different. As a result, it is confirmed that the proposed formula can represent accurately the experimental behaviors of the heat-conduction error which cannot be explained appropriately by the existing formula. In addition, we have analyzed theoretically the effects of the heat-conduction error on the fluctuating temperature measurement of a non-isothermal unsteady fluid flow to derive the frequency response of the temperature sensor to be used. The analysis result shows that the heat-conduction error in temperature-fluctuation measurement appears only in a low-frequency range. Therefore, if the power-spectrum distribution of temperature fluctuations to be measured is sufficiently away from the low-frequency range, the heat-conduction error has virtually no effect on the temperature-fluctuation measurements even by the temperature sensor accompanying the heat-conduction error in the mean-temperature measurements.

Thermocouple error correction for measuring the flame temperature with determination of emissivity and heat transfer coefficient

Temperature measurement by thermocouples is prone to errors due to conduction and radiation losses and therefore has to be corrected for precise measurement. The temperature dependent emissivity of the thermocouple wires is measured by the use of thermal infrared camera. The measured emissivities are found to be 20%-40% lower than the theoretical values predicted from theory of electromagnetism. A transient technique is employed for finding the heat transfer coefficients for the lead wire and the bead of the thermocouple. This method does not require the data of thermal properties and velocity of the burnt gases. The heat transfer coefficients obtained from the present method have an average deviation of 20% from the available heat transfer correlations in literature for non-reacting convective flow over cylinders and spheres. The parametric study of thermocouple error using the numerical code confirmed the existence of a minimum wire length beyond which the conduction loss is a constant minimal. Temperature of premixed methane-air flames stabilised on 16 mm diameter tube burner is measured by three B-type thermocouples of wire diameters: 0.15 mm, 0.30 mm, and 0.60 mm. The measurements are made at three distances from the burner tip (thermocouple tip to burner tip/burner diameter = 2, 4, and 6) at an equivalence ratio of 1 for the tube Reynolds number varying from 1000 to 2200. These measured flame temperatures are corrected by the present numerical procedure, the multi-element method, and the extrapolation method. The flame temperatures estimated by the two-element method and extrapolation method deviate from numerical results within 2.5% and 4%, respectively.

Thin-filament pyrometry with a digital still camera

A novel thin-filament pyrometer is presented. It involves a consumer-grade color digital still camera with 6 megapixels and 12 bits per color plane. SiC fibers were used and scanning-electron microscopy found them to be uniform with diameters of 13.9 micro m. Measurements were performed in a methane-air coflowing laminar jet diffusion flame with a luminosity length of 72 mm. Calibration of the pyrometer was accomplished with B-type thermocouples. The pyrometry measurements yielded gas temperatures in the range of 1400-2200 K with an estimated uncertainty of +/-60 K, a relative temperature resolution of +/-0.215 K, a spatial resolution of 42 mum, and a temporal resolution of 0.66 ms. Fiber aging for 10 min had no effect on the results. Soot deposition was less problematic for the pyrometer than for the thermocouple.

Measurement of High Gas Temperatures with Fine Wire Thermocouples

The recent advent of reliable thermocouple pairs of high melting point has provided new capabilities for high temperature gas measurement. The errors involved in such measurements using fine wire thermocouples are dependent upon radiation from the wire, conduction to the main leads, and convection to the wire. These are all discussed, together with methods for calculating the appropriate corrections. Some numerical results are presented.