Talk Abstract:

Combustion Leftovers

Rodney Weber
School of Mathematics and Statistics
University College of University of New South Wales
ADFA, Canberra 2600
r-weber@adfa.edu.au
http://www.ma.adfa.edu.au/~row/
http://www.ma.adfa.edu.au/Research/combustion.html

Joint work with Geoff Mercer & Harvinder Sidhu.

Combustion processes almost never completely exhaust all of the available fuel. In this talk, we will consider three combustion scenarios (back to back premixed flames in stagnation point flow, travelling combustion waves and microgravity spherical flame balls) and show how to calculate the amount of fuel which will be leftover no matter how long we allow the combustion processes to continue. Mathematical biologists will be familiar with an analogue of this in disease modelling, where there are always some susceptibles left after the passage of an epidemic. In a bushfire or forest fire context this is seen as unburnt solid fuel. The main reason for combustion leftovers is the heat loss, which can never be completely eliminated.

Material used during the talk

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Back to IMA Minisymposium: Mathematical Investigations of Models in Combustion

1999-2000 Reactive Flow and Transport Phenomena