Characterization of a premixed flat combustor through plasma current measurements

Chemical reactions inside hydrocarbon flame can generate charged species that can be collected by a polarized electrode placed near the flame front. Such current can give valuable information about the combustion status. In this paper, methane combustion was investigated analyzing the current-voltage characteristic curves at different thermal loads and gas mixture fractions. The considered experimental setup consists of a flat burner at the atmospheric pressure where certain premixed fractions of air and fuel were fed to. A preliminary simple model was introduced to describe the characteristic system response and the relation between fitting parameters and different combustion regimes has been discussed.