Suspended fuel droplet burning in a combined high temperature and high pressure environment

The data presented here describe the burning of single suspended droplets of n-heptane at elevated temperatures and pressures. A combustion chamber was built in such a way that ambient conditions of high pressure air, up to 10 atm, and elevated temperature, up to 150 °C, were first controlled and then the droplet remotely suspended and ignited. The instantaneous droplet size during burning was determined from movie photographs by prismoidal integration for an accurate volume of the unsymmetric droplets. The burning rate constant, K, was shown to be an important function of pressure; however no apparent dependence on temperature was observed for the range of temperatures and droplet sizes studied. A key observation is that the burning rate constant is significantly dependent upon the initial droplet diameter, D₀, indicating an apparent effect of free convection.