Laminar flame speed and autoignition are two fundamental
characteristics
of a hydrocarbon’s combustion. These two characteristics are
extensively studied due to their importance in designing and developing
combustion systems. However, a regime in which these two characteristics
simultaneously affect the combustion process is not well understood.
Thus, the primary focus of this investigation is to understand the
autoignition-assisted flame regime prior to the first-stage heat release.
The premixed mixture of n-heptane in oxygen–nitrogen–diluent
at an equivalence ratio of 1.0, a compressed gas pressure of 6.85
bar, and compressed gas temperatures of 621 K (when using argon) and
616 K (when using helium) were studied in this work. At these initial
conditions, the mixture ignition delays are 32.31 ms (using argon)
and 53.92 ms (using helium). The flame-propagating images were recorded
using a high-speed camera at different spark ignition times to measure
the flame locations. The Rapid Compression MachineFlame (RCM-Flame)
apparatus was used to perform experiments, and one-dimensional modeling
and three-dimensional numerical modeling were performed. The simulations
provided data to understand the effect of stretch on the measured
spherical burning velocity. The measured and simulated autoignition-assisted
laminar flame speeds were in excellent agreement, the linear method
can be used to remove the stretch from the spherical burning velocity,
and the autoignition-assisted flame speeds show a negligible dependency
on the spark ignition times when the first-stage heat release is negligible.