A high-pressure plug flow reactor for combustion chemistry investigations

Abstract

A plug flow reactor (PFR) is built for investigating the oxidation chemistry of fuels at up to 50 bar and 1000 K. These conditions include those corresponding to the low temperature combustion (i.e. the autoignition) that commonly occurs in internal combustion engines. Turbulent flow that approximates ideal, plug flow conditions is established in a quartz tube reactor. The reacting mixture is highly diluted by excess air to reduce the reaction rates for kinetic investigations. A novel mixer design is used to achieve fast mixing of the preheated air and fuel vapour at the reactor entrance, reducing the issue of reaction initialization in kinetic modelling. A water-cooled probe moves along the reactor extracting gases for further analysis. Measurement of the sampled gas temperature uses an extended form of a three-thermocouple method that corrects for radiative heat losses from the thermocouples to the enclosed PFR environment.