Abstract.
Experimental results from a study on the critical condition for deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT) in methane-air mixtures are presented. Experiments were carried out at 293 K and 1 atm using methane-air mixtures with methane concentrations ranging from 5.5 to 17% vol. The tests were performed in detonation tubes with inner-diameters of 174 mm and 520 mm. Detonation cell widths \(\lambda\) were determined in the tests for a range of methane concentrations. The results of DDT tests indicate that for a tube cross-sectional area blockage ratio (BR) of 0.3 the critical condition for DDT can be characterized by the \(d/\lambda = 1\) criterion. However, for a BR = 0.6 the critical value \(d/\lambda\) was significantly higher. The data also show that the critical condition for DDT can be described by \(L/\lambda = 7\), where L is the characteristic length-scale of the channel volume between orifice plates. This length-scale is defined by a grouping of the orifice plate dimensions (inner and outer-diameter) and plate spacing.
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Received 30 November 2001 / Accepted 5 May 2002 Published online 12 August 2002
Correspondence to: S. Dorofeev. Present address: Institute for Nuclear and Energy Technologies (IKET) Research Center Karlsruhe (FZK), P.O. Box 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany (e-mail: dorofeev@ifet.fzk.de)
An abridged version of this paper was presented at the 18th Int. Colloqium on the Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems at Seattle, USA, from July 29 to August 3, 2001.
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Kuznetsov, M., Ciccarelli, G., Dorofeev, S. et al. DDT in methane-air mixtures. Shock Waves 12, 215–220 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00193-002-0155-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00193-002-0155-0