INSTABILITY OF PROPANE-AIR MIXTURE FLAME PROPAGATION IN A NARROW CHANNEL

Abstract

An experimental study of propane-air flame propagation in a flat narrow channel is presented. It has been discovered that as the width of a narrow channel decreases to a critical value, cylindrical the flame front becomes unstable compared to monotonically increasing short-wave perturbations. It is shown that the flame front features perturbations on the flame surface with specific amplitude and wavelength that depend on the channel width and its orientation relative to the gravitational acceleration vector.