Stretch effects extracted from inwardly and outwardly propagating spherical premixed flames

Unsteady propagation of spherical flames, both inward and outward, are studied numerically extensively for single-step reaction and for different Lewis numbers of fuel/oxidizer. The dependence of flame speed ratio (s) and flame temperature ratio are obtained for a range of Lewis numbers and stretch (kappa) values. These results of s versus kappa show that the asymptotic theory by Frankel and Sivashinsky is reasonable for outward propagation. Other theories are unsatisfactory both quantitatively and qualitatively. The stretch effects are much higher for negative stretch than for positive stretch, as also seen in the theory of Frankel and Sivashinsky. The linearity of the flame speed ratio vs stretch relationship is restricted to nondimensional stretch of +/-0.1. It is shown further that the results from cylindrical flames are identical to the spherical flame on flame speed ratio versus nondimensional stretch plot thus confirming the generality of the concept of stretch. The comparison of the variation of (ds/dkappa)kappa=0 with beta(Lc - 1) show an offset between the computed and the asymptotic results of Matalon and Matkowsky. The departure of negative stretch results from this variation is significant. Several earlier experimental results are analysed and set out in the form of s versus kappa plot. Comparison of the results with experiments seem reasonable for negative stretch. The results for positive stretch are satisfactory qualitatively for a few cases. For rich propane-air, there are qualitative differences pointing to the need for full chemistry calculations in the extraction of stretch effects.

Stretch effects extracted from propagating spherical premixed flames with detailed chemistry

This paper is concerned with extracting stretch effects from outward propagating spherical flames with full chemistry. It is a continuation of a recently published study from this laboratory where it is shown that single-step chemistry is insufficient to explain the experimental results on methane, propane and hydrogen-air systems. Comparisons of the present full chemistry calculations with the experimental results for several fuel/air systems are good/excellent, with the exception of rich propane-air for which it is argued that soot chemistry with attendant radiation loss need to be invoked. The reversal in trends of stretch effects due to change in pressure, initial temperature and N-2 dilution (observed in experiments) can be predicted well by full chemistry but not with simple single-step chemistry. Analysis of the results shows the important role played by many intermediate species and explains why full chemistry is needed to predict stretch effects.

Recognition of Kannada characters extracted from scene images

In this paper, we describe a method for feature extraction and classification of characters manually isolated from scene or natural images. Characters in a scene image may be affected by low resolution, uneven illumination or occlusion. We propose a novel method to perform binarization on gray scale images by minimizing energy functional. Discrete Cosine Transform and Angular Radial Transform are used to extract the features from characters after normalization for scale and translation. We have evaluated our method on the complete test set of Chars74k dataset for English and Kannada scripts consisting of handwritten and synthesized characters, as well as characters extracted from camera captured images. We utilize only synthesized and handwritten characters from this dataset as training set. Nearest neighbor classification is used in our experiments.