UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Radiation Transport Measurements in Methanol Pool Fires with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy
    (2008) Yilmaz, Aykut; Jackson, Gregory S; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Pool fires rely on radiation and conduction heat feedback from the combustion process to the liquid surface to vaporize the fuel. This coupled relationship determines the fuel burning rate and thus the fire structure and size. Radiative heat transfer is the dominant heat feedback in large pool fires. Species concentrations and temperatures have large influence on the radiative heat transfer in the fuel rich-core between the flame and the pool surface. To study radiative transport in the fuel-rich core, an experimental method was developed to measure radiative absorption through various pathlengths inside a 30 cm diameter methanol pool fire by using a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer with N2 purged optical probes. The measured spectra are used to estimate species concentration profiles of methanol, CO, and CO2 in the fuel rich core by fitting predictions of a spectrally resolved radiation transport model to the measured spectra. Results show the importance of reliable temperature measurements for fitting the data and the need for further measurements to further understand the structure of fuel rich cores in pool fires.