https://doi.org/10.1051/epjap/2020200228
Regular Article
A versatile set-up to study plasma/microwave sources for liquid fuel ignition
1
ONERA/DMPE, Université de Toulouse,
31055
Toulouse, France
2
LAPLACE, CNRS, Université de Toulouse,
Toulouse, France
* e-mail: beatrice.fragge@onera.fr
Received:
9
July
2020
Received in final form:
16
October
2020
Accepted:
22
October
2020
Published online: 11 December 2020
Motivated by the high demand for an alternative, more reliable, high energy ignition source to facilitate the re-ignition of lean-burn combustion chambers which are necessary to reduce pollutant emissions, a new set-up has been designed to study plasma/microwave sources. The use of a waveguide-based resonant cavity leads to very low power plasma ignition. An example in this paper shows that a plasma at atmospheric pressure can be maintained with less than 2 W input power. Such a performance is possible using the large variety of possible adjustments (resonance frequency, different kind of initiators, etc.) that this versatile set-up offers. To illustrate the wide range of possible studies, another example is given and discussed : minimum ignition energy for an ethanol droplet stream with aluminum and stainless steel initiators. The results show that the initiator material and its surface quality have an influence on the minimum ignition energy, especially for large gaps. Depending on the gap size we can get down to under 10 W entering the cavity to ignite the droplet stream.
© B. Fragge et al., EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
