Raman-corrected two-photon absorption laser induced fluorescence of atomic oxygen in premixed hydrogen, cellular tubular flames

Femtosecond, Two-photon Absorption Laser Induced Fluorescence (fs-TALIF) corrected for collisional quenching with Raman scattering is used to capture spatially resolved atomic oxygen profiles in lean premixed, hydrogen cellular tubular flames. This method has allowed comparisons of number density and O-atom concentration distributions in flames of variable stretch rates in a manner similar to that previously performed on the minor flame species H and OH. As stretch rate increases, the radii of peak O-atom in the cells decrease while O-atom concentrations remain relatively unaffected. This differs from non-cellular flame data where increasing stretch rate increases minor species number densities. Three chemical mechanisms are employed to perform direct numerical simulations of the O-atom profiles in the tubular flames and are found to be in close agreement with one another. For N2-diluted flames, the simulations predict O-atom number densities within the uncertainty of the data for the cellular region but over-predict the O-atom number densities in the dearth region of the 2D flames. Additionally, simulated O-atom concentrations contradict the trend of the data and increase with stretch rate. Changing the diluent from N2 to CO2 lowers the peak concentrations of atomic oxygen as CO2 becomes reactive at flame temperatures. This allows the CO+O(+M)⇌CO2(+M) reaction to consume atomic oxygen. Flames diluted with carbon dioxide caused the model to over-predict the O-atom concentration in these flames. This discrepancy is similar to past minor species measurements in cellular tubular flames though it does not occur in minor species profiles of non-cellular (1D), CO2-diluted tubular flames. The discrepancy could be caused by the simplifying relationships employed to convert the 3D geometry to 2D in the simulations.