A comparative study of the sooting tendencies of various C5–C8 alkanes, alkenes and cycloalkanes in counterflow diffusion flames

Abstract

In this work, sooting tendencies of various vaporized C5-C8 alkanes, alkenes, cycloalkanes were investigated in a counterflow diffusion flame (CDF) configuration. Mie scattering and laser induced incandescence (LII) were respectively employed to measure the sooting limits and soot volume fraction, both of which were used as quantitative sooting tendency indices of the flames. Research foci were paid to analyze the impacts of fuel molecular structure on sooting tendencies, ranging from the length of the carbon chain, fuel unsaturation, presence and position of the branched chain as well as the cyclic ring structure. It was found that the present CDF-based sooting tendency data did not always agree with existing literature results that were obtained from either coflow or premixed flame experiments, indicating the importance of considering flame conditions when assessing fuel sooting tendencies. Several interesting observations were made; in particular, our results showed that the sooting limits of C5-C8 n-alkane is comparable, regardless of the carbon-chain length, indicating an interesting fuel similarity pertinent to sooting tendency. In addition, we found that cyclopentane, with a five-membered ring, has even stronger sooting propensity than the six-membered cyclohexane; this trend occurs because cyclopentane prefers to decompose to more odd-carbon radicals of cyclopentadienyl and allyl, which are efficient aromatic precursors. Our results are expected to serve as necessary complements to existing sooting index data for a deeper understanding of the correlation between fuel molecular structures and their sooting tendencies.

Keywords

• Soot formation
• Sooting tendency
• Counterflow diffusion flame
• Cycloalkanes
• Alkanes