Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

An apparatus has been described for the quantitative collection of soot liberated from laminar diffusion flames. This apparatus has been used to measure sooting rates of ethylene diffusion flames under various conditions of dilution. Plots of sooting rate against ethylene flow have been obtained using nitrogen-oxygen mixtures with oxygen index values over the range 0.135 to 0.405 (13.5 per cent to 40.5 per cent oxygen). Less extensive data have been obtained with 2.8 per cent water vapour present in the nitrogen-oxygen stream. The results have been cross-plotted to show the influence of oxygen index on sooting rate at various fuel flows.