Numerical assessment of accurate

measurements of laminar flame speed

Cite as: AIP Conference Proceedings 1790, 110006 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4968713
Published Online: 07 December 2016

Joules Goulier, Katarzyna Bizon, Nabiha Chaumeix, et al.

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Unsupervised analysis of experiments of laminar flame propagation in a spherical enclosure

AIP Conference Proceedings 1790, 110003 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4968710

AIP Conference Proceedings 1790, 110006 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4968713 1790, 110006

© 2016 Author(s).
 Numerical Assessment of Accurate Measurements of
Laminar Flame Speed
Joules Goulier1,2, Katarzyna Bizon3, Nabiha Chaumeix1, Nicolas Meynet2, and
Gaetano Continillo4,a)
1
ICARE-CNRS, 1C av. Del a Recherche Scientifique 45000 Orléans, France
2
Institut de Radioprotection et de Sureté Nucléaire IRSN, 92262 Fontenay aux Roses, France
3
Cracow University of Technology, ul. Warszawska 24, 30-155 Kraków, Poland
4
Università degli Studi del Sannio, Piazza Roma 21, Benevento, Italy
a)
Corresponding author: continillo@unisannio.it

Abstract. In combustion, the laminar flame speed constitutes an important parameter that reflects the chemistry of
oxidation for a given fuel, along with its transport and thermal properties. Laminar flame speeds are used (i) in turbulent
models used in CFD codes, and (ii) to validate detailed or reduced mechanisms, often derived from studies using ideal
reactors and in diluted conditions as in jet stirred reactors and in shock tubes. End-users of such mechanisms need to have
an assessment of their capability to predict the correct heat released by combustion in realistic conditions. In this view,
the laminar flame speed constitutes a very convenient parameter, and it is then very important to have a good knowledge
of the experimental errors involved with its determination. Stationary configurations (Bunsen burners, counter-flow
flames, heat flux burners) or moving flames (tubes, spherical vessel, soap bubble) can be used. The spherical expanding
flame configuration has recently become popular, since it can be used at high pressures and temperatures. With this
method, the flame speed is not measured directly, but derived through the recording of the flame radius. The method used
to process the radius history will have an impact on the estimated flame speed. Aim of this work is to propose a way to
derive the laminar flame speed from experimental recording of expanding flames, and to assess the error magnitude.

EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY
Experimental Setup. The spherical bomb is a jacketed stainless steel vessel. The internal diameter is 476 mm with
a thickness of 12 mm, for a maximum operating pressure of 50 bar. Heated thermal fluid circulates in the jacket to
ensure constant wall temperature, measured up to a maximum of 500 K with a precision of 1 K. A Kistler 601A
quartz pressure transducer located on the inner wall is used to record the pressure. Four quartz windows on the
equatorial plan of the vessel allow the flame to be recorded up to a radius of 46 mm, when only 0.85 % of the total
volume is burned. Hence, the pressure can be considered constant during flame propagation and no wall-effects take
place. The visualization of the flame front is obtained via a Z shape Schlieren diagnostic (Fig. 1a) with a high speed
camera ensuring acquisition up to 25,000 Hz at a resolution of 768x768 pixels. The flame is ignited via two tungsten
electrodes connected to a high voltage generator, delivering about 2 mJ for a gap distance of 2 mm. The spark
triggers pressure and camera measurements at the same time via a TTL generator. The mixtures were prepared
directly inside the spherical vessel using compressed hydrogen, methane, ethane from Air liquid, ethanol from
Sigma-Aldrich, and laboratory dry air (0.21O2 + 0.79N2). Partial pressures of the gases were measured using
capacitive manometers (MKS) of two different scales (133 mbar and 1333 mbar). According the precision of the
manometers, the mixtures were obtained with an accuracy of 1%.
Flame Radius Measurement. The images of the growing flame are acquired using a high speed camera, then
transferred on a PC to be analyzed. Figure 1b gives an illustration of the recorded images. The images were
processed using MATLAB 2013b and the Image Processing toolbox. The first image of the series, where usually no
flame or a small kernel is present, is defined as the background image. Figure 2 shows the successive steps of the

International Conference of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering 2016 (ICCMSE 2016)
AIP Conf. Proc. 1790, 110006-1–110006-4; doi: 10.1063/1.4968713
Published by AIP Publishing. 978-0-7354-1454-9/$30.00

110006-1
image processing: The first step is to perform an absolute subtraction of each image of the series (Figure 2.b) with
the background (Figure 2.a) followed by contrast adjustment. The resulting image (Figure 2.c) highlights the flame
sphere and removes the background. The next step is an edge detection using the Canny method [1] which
underlines all edges of the flame (Figure 2.d), the electrodes and, at high temperatures, thermal gradients inside the
bomb. Unwanted areas are then removed from the image by applying masks. A boxed mask is manually applied
over the electrodes, so that every edge detected inside the box is discarded. Two elliptic masks are sequentially
applied to each image: an inner ellipse will mask every pixel that is under the ellipse fitted to the previous image
minus a small variation (1 to 3 pixels). A second ellipse will mask every pixel that is above the ellipse fitted to the
previous image plus a variation of 10 to 20 pixels. Figure 2.e shows (blue area) the region where the edges in white
are kept; red edges are discarded. All pixels kept are used to fit an ellipse using the method described by Pilu et al.,
giving the major and minor axis , and orientation [2]. The radius of the flame is then computed as √ · .

Mirror 

Pinhole

Lens  High Speed Camera

pressure (bar)
Light Source

Screen

Knife

Mirror 

(a) (b) (c)

FIGURE 1. (a): Experimental Setup. (b): Example of recorded images. (c) Example of the pressure signal for a methane / air
flame at an equivalence ratio of 1.1 initially at 303 K and 1 atm.

FIGURE 2. Image processing: (a) Background; (b) image of an 11.8 mm flame; (c) absolute subtraction of the background; (d)
edge detected on the subtracted image; (e) edge cleaned with a satisfactory region; (f) ellipse fitting added to the flame image.

NUMERICAL PROCEDURE

The unstretched flame speed, and the Markstein length, were determined using both linear (Markstein and
Karlovitz) and non-linear (Romney and Sivashinsky) models. For the linear model, given by:
(1)
the unknown parameters, and , are determined by simple linear regression. The nonlinear model is given by:
L L L
ln 2 , where: and (2)
L L L
Using basic properties of logarithms and using the definition of , the model can be rewritten as:
ln 2 (3)

By replacing , the problem takes the form of a fully implicit parametrized ordinary differential equation:
ln 2 (4)

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The associated initial condition is given by:
; where , (5)

Parameter estimation procedure. The parametrized implicit initial value problem of Eqs. (4,5) can be written as:
, ;
, ; 0 (6)
; (7)
where ; , ,…, is a state vector, , ,…, is a vector of unknown parameters
and is a know function. In practice, in experiments we observe only a surrogate of ; , namely:
, 1, … , (8)
where e(ti) is a measurement error. The vector of parameters can be estimated by minimizing a cost function:
∑ ̃ ; (9)
At each time , is the experimentally observed value, and ̃ ; is the numerically predicted value.

Uncertainties in multi-variable functions. To evaluate the influence of the measurement error e(ti) onto the
uncertainty of the estimation of parameter vector , ,…, , consider a general function of variables,
, ,…, , 1, … , . One needs to map a series of measurements, , , … , , and their associated
errors though the function . Assume that the best estimate of is made through the mean values of the
measurements, hence , ,…, . The error in is then a function of both the mean values and their
errors, i.e. , , … , ; Δ , Δ , … , ∆ . In particular, the uncertainty in due to the uncertainty in is:
| , ,…, Δ ,…, , ,…, ,…, | (10)

whereas the total error in is defined in terms of the norm: ∑ .

Numerical example. To validate the proposed parameter estimation procedure, consisting of least square fitting
(Eq. (9) coupled with solution of a fully implicit initial value problem (Eq. (4,5)), a synthetic numerical problem was
constructed. Namely, a pair of model parameters was chosen ( 0.85 ; 4000 ) and the initial conditions
were imposed as 0.0025 ; 10. Calculating the consistent initial condition for the first derivative of
the radius, , Eq. (4) was integrated for , where 0.0125, to create a vector of observations
̃ ̃ , ̃ ,…, ̃ , where 251. The values of radius simulated from the model are plotted in
Figure 3a. Figure 3b shows the corresponding values of the flame velocity (determined directly from Eq. (4))
plotted as a function of stretch, . Then the parameter estimation procedure was employed to the simulated data, in
the first step taking into account all 251 observations, which corresponds to the flame radius ranging from
10 for 0.0125 46.95. The estimate obtained from the procedure is 0.8499, 3999.99 ,
confirming that, despite the complicated numerical procedure involving the solution of a fully explicit initial value
problem when minimizing the cost function, the original value of 0.85, 4000 is recovered with high
accuracy. Figure 3c shows the extrapolated flame velocity for the estimated values of the parameters.
Obviously, from the mathematical point of view, the choice of , and , and so and does not influence
the value of , when dealing with analytically determined observations . This is not the case when dealing with the
numerically determined vector of observations ̃ ̃ , ̃ ,…, ̃ . In fact, denoting by the true
solution of Eq. (4), sampled at discrete time instants , 1, … , , the numerical solution can be expressed as:
̃ , 1, … , (11)
where is a numerical error (it can be assumed that , 1, … , ). Figure 4a and 4b show the
absolute error, , of the parameter estimates, in the range 10 20 , used in the fitting procedure.
Changing the minimum radius implies changing the number of points needed to cover the radius span. Here the
error is defined classically as , , 1, … , . The choice of and of the number of points has
little influence on the accuracy. Figure 4c shows the extrapolated flame velocity for the three extreme cases
considered, namely: 10 and 46.5 (the whole range of radii taken into account), 20
and 46.5 (lowest values of radius discarded) and 10 and 40 (highest values of radius
discarded). As expected, and do not change significantly, and the curves overlap.

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 FIGURE 3. (a): Simulated flame radius, and (b): corresponding flame velocity plotted as a function of stretch,
calculated for ̃ . (c) Flame velocity as a function of stretch, for 0.8499 and 3999.99.

FIGURE 4. (a): Absolute error of the estimates of the unstretched flame speed and (b): the Markstein length (b), for
varying minimum radius . (c) Flame velocity as a function of stretch, , for different values of and .

Finally, the influence of the measurement error introduced in the numerically derived data was evaluated,
assuming the maximal measurement error on the radius 0.198 . In the first step, all components of ̃ were
translated by , to create new data vectors containing a constant systematic error, namely:
̃ , 1, … , ; ̃ , 1, … , .
The values of the absolute error for the parameters estimated using as input vectors ̃ , ̃ and ̃
(remember that ̃ , 1, … , ) are reported in Table 1. The error of the estimates obtained for
̃ is much smaller - by four orders of magnitude for and by three orders of magnitude for - than the error
obtained for ̃ and ̃ . This shows that the consequence of the error introduced by the numerical
procedure on the parameter estimates is much smaller than the consequence of the expected minimal experimental
error (corresponding to one pixel in the observation).
TABLE 1. Influence of the measurement error on the absolute error of the parameter estimates.
̃ ̃ ̃
, 2.19 · 10 0.0164 0.0165
, 0.0011 3.2350 3.2156

Successively, to evaluate the total error in , , the uncertainty of the estimate due to the
uncertainty in , 1, … , , was calculated according to Eq. (10). Relatively high values of uncertainty were
obtained when altering by the measurement error the first point , that is 64.4219 and
0.1935. They are caused by the fact that, when solving the initial value problem within the optimization procedure,
this point is set as initial condition. The total error is:

∑ 65.8562 ; ∑ 0.1954 .

REFERENCES
1. J. Canny, “A Computational Approach to Edge Detection,” in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence,Vol. PAMI-8, No. 6, 679-698, (1986).
2. M. Pilu, A. Fitzgibbon and R.Fisher, “Ellipse-specific Direct least-square Fitting, ” in IEEE International
Conference on Image Processing, Lausanne, September (1996).

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