An Experimental Study into the Ignition of Methane and Ethane Blends in a New Shock-tube Facility

A new shock tube targeting low temperature, high pressure, and long test times was designed and installed at the Turbomachinery Laboratory in December of 2008. The single-pulse shock tube uses either lexan diaphragms or die-scored aluminum disks of up to 4 mm in thickness. The modular design of the tube allows for optimum operation over a large range of thermodynamic conditions from 1 to 100 atm and between 600-4000 K behind the reflected shock wave. The new facility allows for ignition delay time, chemical kinetics, high-temperature spectroscopy, vaporization, atomization, and solid particulate experiments. An example series of ignition delay time experiments was made on mixtures of CH4/C2H6/O2/Ar at pressures from 1 to 30.7 atm, intermediate temperatures from 1082 to 2248 K, varying dilutions (between 75 and 98% diluent), and equivalence ratios ranging from fuel lean (0.5) to fuel rich (2.0) in this new facility. The percentage by volume variation and equivalence ratios for the mixtures studied were chosen to cover a wide parameter space not previously well studied. Results are then used to validate and improve a detailed kinetics mechanism which models the oxidation and ignition of methane and other higher order hydrocarbons, through C4, with interest in further developing reactions important to methane- and ethane-related chemistry.