Fast Flow Reactor
The newly designed high temperature fast flow reactor is based on the expansion of a small amount of hot gas through a rotating shopper. A Laval nozzle with a normal shock wave regulates the instantaneous flow rate during the opening of the chopper. The wall free reactor is ideal for the study or radical-radical reaction as well as for the study of heterogeneous phenomena at the surface of suspended nanoparticles.The pulsed nature of the flow, combined with the accessible temperature range makes the apparatus a unique tool to study the spectroscopy, kinetics and dynamics of short lifetime gas intermediates.Schematic of the pulsed hight-temperature fast flow reactor
The length of the reaction tube can be changed from 10 cm to up to 70 cm at 10 cm increments. It is connected to a 6-way optical cell for LIF measurements. Radicals are generated coaxially to the flow using laser photolysis and detected perpendicularly to the flow using laser-induced fluorescence. For a constant nozzle–detection cell distance, changing the laser delay time with 1 ms time resolution varies the reaction time.
The flow reactor will be used to measure reaction kinetics and detect products of resonance radical oxidation reactions at high temperature. These reactions are proposed to be the main removal process of resonance stabilized radical in combustion environments.
The reaction flow is characterized using Pitot tube measurements as well as laser spectroscopy. The temperature in the center of the flow is determined using UV spectroscopy of the CN radical. LIF spectra are recorded by scanning the (0-0) B-X rovibronic absorption band of the radical near 387 nm. The rotational population is fit to a Maxwell-Bolzmann distribution to infer the rotational temperature.