Flame structure of a low-pressure laminar premixed and lightly sooting acetylene flame and the effect of ethanol addition

The flame structure of a fuel-rich (ϕ=2.4), laminar premixed, and lightly sooting acetylene flame at 40mbar and the influence of ethanol addition on the species pool was investigated. Special emphasis was put on the analysis of important soot precursors like propargyl, benzene, and the polyynes. The mole fractions of more than 50 stable and radical species up to m/z=170 are obtained experimentally in the flames by molecular-beam mass spectrometry (MBMS) in combination with single-photon ionization (SPI) by vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in Berkeley, CA, USA. For the neat acetylene flame, successful measurements were performed with a combination of MBMS and imaging photoelectron photoion coincidence spectrometry (iPEPICO) at the VUV beamline at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) in Villigen, Switzerland and adding additional species information to the data set. Some interesting isomers (C3H2, C4H5, C4H2O) can be clearly identified by comparison of measured photoionization efficiency (PIE) curves or threshold photoelectron (TPE) spectra with Franck–Condon simulations or literature spectra, respectively. Because of apparatus improvements, the chemical resolution in this study goes beyond prior work and provides a high-quality data set for the development of reaction mechanisms at fuel-rich, low-pressure conditions.