Chaotic oscillation in diffusion flame induced by radiative heat loss

Abstract

We numerically investigate the dynamic behavior of flame front instability in a diffusion flame caused by radiative heat loss from the viewpoint of nonlinear dynamics. As the Damköhler number increases at a high activation temperature, the dynamic behavior of the flame front undergoes a significant transition from a steady-state to high-dimensional deterministic chaos through the period-doubling cascade process known as the Feigenbaum transition. The existence of high-dimensional chaos in flame dynamics is clearly demonstrated using a sophisticated nonlinear time series analysis technique based on chaos theory.

Keywords:

• Diffusion flame
• chaos
• bifurcation
• radiation
• flame instability

Acknowledgements

Two of the authors (HG and TM) are supported by a “Research Grant from The Mazda Foundation”, “Research Grant from Kurata Hitachi Science Technology Foundation”, “the CASIO Science Foundation” and a “Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT)”.