Study of Gas Flame Acceleration & Deflagration to Detonation Transition

Abstract

The acceleration of a flame and its detonation has applications in pulse detonation engines and a significant component to consider whilst regarding industrial safety. The present study is to understand the mechanism of a flame’s acceleration, propagation and Deflagration-to-Detonation Transition (DDT) process. The Deflagration-to-Detonation Transition (DDT) is the process by which a subsonic wave progresses into a supersonic one. In this study, a 2-Dimensional axisymmetric tube is considered and the stoichiometric mixture of different hydrocarbon gaseous fuels such as Ethylene-Air mixture, Hydrogen-Air mixture, Methane-Air mixture are used with a pressure-based solver with absolute velocity formulation for performing computational analyses using the ANSYS-Fluent Computational Fluent Dynamics software package. The theoretical calculation pertained to the Chapman-Jouguet detonation theory. The computational work was carried out to calculate the run up distance from the region of ignition to the region of detonation and the DDT process was captured for the given time, from which the mechanism involved in the DDT process was inferred.