Open AccessThe initial stages of gaseous explosions —Part II. An examination of the supposed law of flame speeds
Author(s) -
William A. Bone,
R. P. Fraser,
Dennis A. Winter
Publication year - 1927
Publication title -
proceedings of the royal society of london. series a, containing papers of a mathematical and physical character
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2053-9150
pISSN - 0950-1207
DOI - 10.1098/rspa.1927.0050
Subject(s) - combustion , flame speed , oxygen , laminar flame speed , flammability limit , chemistry , limit (mathematics) , bunsen burner , mechanics , division (mathematics) , law , adiabatic flame temperature , premixed flame , thermodynamics , physics , organic chemistry , mathematics , combustor , mathematical analysis , arithmetic , political science
In the year 1922 W. Payman and R. V. Wheeler published a paper entitled “The Combustion of Complex Gaseous Mixtures” in which, after stating that “in general, if a limit mixture with air of one gas is mixed, in any proportions, with a limit mixture with air of another gas, the speed of propagation of flame in both mixtures being, as it is, approximately the same under the same conditions of experiment, the speed of propagation of flame in the resultant complex mixture (which is also a limit mixture) is unchanged,” they proceeded to say that the same thing holds good for the propagation of flame“ not only in limit mixtures, but in all mixtures of inflammable gases with air (or oxygen), provided that the mixtures of the individual gases are of the same type, all containing excess of oxygen or all containing excess of combustible gas.” And, finally, they promulgated a new “law of flame speeds” which ran as follows: “Given two or more mixtures of air or oxygen with different individual gases, in each of which the. speed of propagation of flame is the same, all combinations of the mixtures of the same type propagate flame at the same speeds, under the same conditions of experiment.” Since its original publication, they have continued to press this “law” upon the attention of other workers in the field, using it as a basis for interpreting results from other laboratories than their own, even to the extent of claiming that it governs the division of oxygen between two combustible gases present in excess. Indeed they contend that “ so far as the propagation of flame is concerned, a mixture of a number of different combustible gases with air (for example) can be regarded as the summation of mixtures of each individual gas with air, the proportions of combustible gas and air in each being such that the speed of flame in it, if the mixture were burning alone, would be the same as in the complex mixture.” Moreover, in the well-known case (investigated by one of us) of the explosion of mixtures of the type CH4 + O2 +x H2 , where the oxygen has the chance of combining with either of the two combustible gases, they claim that the methane gets the lion’s share of it, not because of its greater affinity for oxygen, but “because the methane-oxygen association that is required to yield the same speed of flame as the hydrogen-oxygen association is the richer in oxygen.”