Experimental investigation of Darrieus-Landau instability effects on turbulent premixed flames

The turbulent propagation speed of a premixed flame can be significantly enhanced by the onset of Darrieus-Landau (DL) instability within the wrinkled and corrugated flamelet regimes of turbulent combustion. Previous studies have revealed the existence of clearly distinct regimes of turbulent propagation, depending on the presence of DL instabilities or lack thereof, named here as super- and subcritical respectively, characterized by different scaling laws for the turbulent flame speed. In this study we present experimental turbulent flame speed measurements for propane/air mixtures at atmospheric pressure, variable equivalence ratio at Lewis numbers greater than one obtained within a Bunsen geometry with particle image velocimetry diagnostics. By varying the equivalence ratio we act on the cut-off wavelength and can thus control DL instability. A classification of observed flames into sub/supercritical regimes is achieved through the characterization of their morphology in terms of flame curvature statistics. Numerical low-Mach number simulations of weakly turbulent two-dimensional methane/air slot burner flames are also performed both in the presence or absence of DL instability and are observed to exhibit similar morphological properties. We show that experimental normalized turbulent propane flame speeds ST/SL are subject to two distinct scaling laws, as a function of the normalized turbulence intensity Urms/SL, depending on the sub/supercritical nature of the propagation regime. We also conjecture, based on the experimental results, that at higher values of turbulence intensity a transition occurs whereby the effects of DL instability become shadowed by the dominant effect of turbulence. © 2014 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.