Premixed turbulent flame structures are imaged with simultaneous formaldehyde and OH PLIF. A new piloted burner was designed to achieve high turbulent Reynolds numbers (Re t ) up to 68,000 and low Damköhler numbers (Da t ). Primary reaction zones are identified by the overlap of the OH and formaldehyde signals and preheat zones of low temperature secondary reactions are identified from the formaldehyde signal. At low Re t of 600, the primary reaction zones are continuous and products do not mix with reactants. This results in thin preheat layers and relatively thin flamelets. As Re t increases, the primary reaction zones become shredded and disconnected. This allows mixing of the hot products with the reactants and broadens the preheat/secondary reaction zones. Additionally, the reaction layers are typically 4-5 times thicker than those in a laminar flamelet. Interestingly, as Re t increases further, the thickness of the reaction layers only increases slowly, but the total area of reaction regions grows rapidly.
I. IntroductionHERE are several gaps in our fundamental understanding of the physics of premixed turbulent flames. Many previous studies 1-10 have been conducted at large turbulence intensities (u'/S L ) but at small values of integral scale , which usually is normalized by laminar flame thickness ). The r.m.s. velocity fluctuation is u' and S L is the unstretched laminar burning velocity. However in many realistic devices it is the product of u' and that is large. Therefore the present work focuses on the regime of large turbulence Reynolds numbers (Re t ) and small Damköhler numbers (Da t ) where: