Detection of molecular oxygen using nanosecond-laser-induced plasma.

Molecular oxygen (O2) concentration is measured by employing nanosecond laser-induced plasmas (ns-LIP) over a broad temperature spectrum ranging from 300 K to 1000 K, in the presence of an additional oxygen-containing molecule, CO2. Typically, emission spectra emanating from ns-LIP are devoid of molecular information, as the ns-LIP causes the dissociation of molecular species within the plasma. However, atomic oxygen absorption lines that momentarily appear at 777 nm in the broadband emission from the early-stage plasma are determined to be highly sensitive to the O2 mole fraction but negligibly affected by the CO2 mole fraction. The atomic O absorbing the plasma emission originates from the O2 adjacent to the plasma: robust UV radiation from the early-stage plasma selectively dissociates adjacent O2, exhibiting a relatively low photodissociation threshold, thus generating the specific meta-stable oxygen capable of absorbing photons at 777 nm. A theoretical model is introduced, explicating the formation of the meta-stable O atom from adjacent O2. To sustain the UV radiation from the plasma under high-temperature and low-density ambient conditions, a preceding breakdown is triggered by a split laser pulse (532 nm). This breakdown acts as a precursor, seeding electrons to intensify the inverse-Bremsstrahlung photon absorption of the subsequent laser pulse (1064 nm). Techniques such as proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and support vector regression (SVR) are employed to precisely evaluate the O2 mole fraction (<1% uncertainty), by analyzing the short-lived (<10 ns) O2-indicator depicted in the early-stage plasma.

Gas composition measurements in randomly distributed and fast moving gas bubbles in two-phase fluids.

Gas composition in randomly distributed and fast-moving bubbles was optically measured aided by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). Laser pulses were focused at a point in a stream of bubbles to induce plasmas for the LIBS measurements. The distance between the laser focal point and liquid-gas interface, or 'depth,' plays a major role in determining the plasma emission spectrum in two-phase fluids. However, the 'depth' effect has not been investigated in previous studies. Therefore, we evaluated the 'depth' effect in a calibration experiment near a still and flat liquid-gas interface using proper orthogonal decomposition, and a support vector regression model was trained to exclude the influence of the interfacing liquid and extract gas composition information from the spectra. The gaseous molecular oxygen mole fraction in the bubbles was accurately measured under realistic two-phase fluid conditions.

A novel diagnostic method based on filter bank theory for fast and accurate detection of thermoacoustic instability.

This study proposes and analyzes a novel methodology that can effectively detect multi-mode combustion instability (CI) in a gas turbine combustor. The experiment is conducted in a model gas turbine combustor, and dynamic pressure (DP) and flame images are examined during the transition from stable to unstable flame, which is driven by changing fuel compositions. As a powerful technique for early detection of CI in multi-mode as well as in single mode, a new filter bank (FB) method based on spectral analysis of DP is proposed. Sequential processing using a triangular filter with Mel-scaling and a Hamming window is applied to increase the accuracy of the FB method, and the instability criterion is determined by calculating the magnitude of FB components. The performance of the FB method is compared with that of two conventional methods that are based on the root-mean-squared DP and temporal kurtosis. From the results, the FB method shows comparable performance in detection speed, sensitivity, and accuracy with other parameters. In addition, the FB components enable the analysis of various frequencies and multi-mode frequencies. Therefore, the FB method can be considered as an additional prognosis tool to determine the multi-mode CI in a monitoring system for gas turbine combustors.