Multicomponent fuel droplet combustion investigation using magnified high speed backlighting and shadowgraph imaging

The liquid-phase processes occurring during fuel droplet combustion are important in deciding the behaviour of the overall combustion process, especially, for the multicomponent fuel droplets. Hence, understanding these processes is essential for explaining the combustion of the multicomponent fuel droplet. However, the very fast combustion of the too small fuel droplet makes experimental investigation of these processes uneasily affordable. In the present work, a high speed backlighting and shadowgraph imaging of the multicomponent fuel droplet combustion including liquid-phase dynamics are performed. Two categories of multicomponent fuels – in which diesel is the base fuel – are prepared and utilized. The first category is biodiesel/diesel and bioethanol/diesel blends, while the second category is the water-in-diesel and diesel-in-water emulsions. Specific optical setups are developed and used for tracking droplet combustion. The first setup is associated with the backlighting imaging with the resulting magnification of the droplet images being 30 times the real size. The second optical setup is used for shadowgraph imaging, with the resulting magnification being 10 times the real size. Using these setups, spatial and temporal tracking of nucleation, bubble generation, internal circulation, puffing, microexplosion, and secondary atomization during the combustion of isolated multicomponent fuel droplets are performed. Spatial and temporal tracking of the sub-droplets generated by secondary atomization, and their subsequent combustion, in addition to their overall lifetimes have also been performed. Accordingly, a comparison of the burning rate constant between the parent droplet and the resulting sub-droplets is carried out. The rate of droplet secondary atomization is higher than those obtained by relatively low imaging rate. Additionally, it is shown that during a large portion of its entire lifetime, the droplet geometry has been affected by combustion significantly.