ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an interesting and varied intellectual challenge but also they underpin many facets of efficiency and safety in combustion applications. The behaviour in thermal ignition, an adiabatic continuous, stirred tank reactor or at a surface is governed by two characteristic times which represent the heat or mass transport rates and the chemical heat release rate. Ignition and extinction phenomena are possible because the condition for stationary states even in the approximate form, can be satisfied by more than one value of θS. With some qualification, the upper root represents the case of extinction. The stationary state is approached in an oscillatory manner at stable conditions which exist on either side of the unstable region. The origins of oscillatory cool flames in a closed vessel are most easily understood by addressing the simplest formal structure which is able to account for these states in a unified thermokinetic theory.
