ABSTRACT
Spray ignition and combustion studies are extremely important to determine flame stability behavior at widely varying loads, to ensure efficient utilization of fossil energy, and to better understand the mechanisms of formation and destruction of pollutants. Extensive fundamental and applied research has been conducted on the combustion of oil sprays and pulverized-fuel particle sprays. Both heterogeneous (e.g., drop combustion either in groups, arrays, or individually) and homogeneous (evaporation of small drops less than 10
µ
m) combustion can occur in a spray. Isolated-particle or isolated-drop models described in Chapter 9 and Chap-
ter 10 yield the parameters controlling the ignition and combustion characteristics of individual drops or particles. Sprays normally involve a large number of drops. The simplest analysis is to treat the fuel spray as an aggregate of the behavior of individual fuel droplets. Thus, the spray combustion rate can be estimated to be the sum of the combustion rates of each of the drops (as if each drop burned individually).
