Optical Properties in the Visible of Overfire Soot in Large Buoyant Turbulent Diffusion Flames

Nonintrusive measurements of the optical properties of soot at visible wavelengths (351.2–800.0 nm) were completed for soot in the overfire region of large (2–7 kW) buoyant turbulent diffusion flames burning in still air at standard temperature and pressure, where soot properties are independent of position and characteristic flame residence time for a particular fuel. Soot from flames fueled with gaseous (acetylene, ethylene, propylene, and butadiene) and liquid (benzene, cyclohexane, toluene, and n-heptane) hydrocarbon fuels were studied. Scattering and extinction measurements were interpreted to find soot optical properties using the Rayleigh-Debye-Gans/polydisperse-fractal-aggregate theory after establishing that this theory provided good predictions of scattering patterns over the present test range. Effects of fuel type on soot optical properties were comparable to experimental uncertainties. Dimensionless extinction coefficients were relatively independent of wavelength for wavelengths of 400–800 nm and yielded a mean value of 8.4 in good agreement with earlier measurements. Present measurements of the refractive index function for absorption, $Em,$ were in good agreement with earlier independent measurements of Dalzell and Sarofim and Stagg and Charalampopoulos. Present values of the refractive index function for scattering, $Fm,$ however, only agreed with these earlier measurements for wavelengths of 400–550 nm but otherwise increased with increasing wavelength more rapidly than the rest. The comparison between present and earlier measurements of the real and imaginary parts of the complex refractive index was similar to $Em$ and $Fm.$[S0022-1481(00)02203-9]