Ignition and combustion behavior of single micron-sized iron particle in hot gas flow

This work investigated the ignition and combustion process of single micron-sized iron particles in the hot gas flow of burned methane-oxygen-nitrogen mixture. The particle emission intensity was recorded by a high-speed camera in different flame conditions. Particle temperature was derived through two-color pyrometry method employing an ICCD camera equipped with a stereoscope. Based on scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image, the microstructure change of iron particles was investigated. Results showed that the temperature of burning particle rose rapidly and was much higher than the ambient temperature. The fresh iron particles mainly went through several stages in hot gas flow: heating, melting, rapid combustion and cooling. Some of them became bright again after cooling. According to the above combustion process, combustion parameters including ignition delay time, accelerated burning time, total burning time and second stage of combustion time were defined. All the above defined parameters were almost linearly increasing with the increase of particle size under the same oxygen concentration. For iron particles with roughly the same size, the ignition delay time, accelerated burning time and total burning time decreased as the effective oxygen concentration increased especially for particle size larger than 40 µm. The second stage of combustion time for particles with similar size were almost the same under different oxygen concentrations. After combustion, most of the particles change from irregular shape to spherical or ellipsoidal shape, and some of them showed hollow shell structure. A phenomenon of nano-sized particles releasing during the iron particles combustion had been identified. The frequently observed luminous tail was attributed to coming from the thermal radiation of the formed nanoparticles, which was supported by the SEM sampling analysis of the combustion products.