Luminous Flame Height Correlation Based on Fuel Mass Flow for a Laminar to Transition-to-Turbulent Regime Diffusion Flame M. De la Cruz-Ávila a*, J. E. De León-Ruiz b, I. Carvajal-Mariscal b, G. Polupan b and L. Di G. Sigalotti c a* Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Ingeniería, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 México City, MÉXICO. b Instituto Politécnico Nacional, ESIME UPALM, Av. IPN s/n, 07738 México City, MÉXICO. c Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco (UAM-A), Departamento de Ciencias Básicas, Av. San Pablo 180, 02200 México City, MÉXICO. *Correspondence:
[email protected] ABSTRACT This paper presents a flame-height correlation for laminar to transition-to-turbulent regime diffusion flames. Flame-height measurements are obtained by means of numerical and experimental studies in which three high definition cameras were employed to take frontal, lateral and 45° angled images simultaneously. The images were analysed using an image-processing algorithm to determine the flame-height through indirect measurement. To locate an overall chemical-flame-length, numerical simulations were conducted with the unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes technique. The eddy-dissipation model was also implemented to calculate chemical reaction rate. The experiments show that this proposed correlation has an adjustment variation of luminous flame-height for the laminar regime of 16.9%, which indicates that, without the use of the intermittent buoyant flame-height correlation, it globally best represents the flame-height in this regime. For the laminar and transition-to-turbulence regime the adjustment variations are 5.54% compared to the most accepted flame-height correlations, thus providing an acceptably good fitting.