Lifting a flame from the flow generating nozzle to some distance apart has a wide variety of effects on the properties of the resulting combustion phenomenon. The reason of this influence is the generation of a non-reacting flow domain where mixing takes place prior to the combustion reaction. It is obvious that the quality of premixing that can be achieved strongly depends on the time that is given to flow and the intensity of the turbulence that is mixing fuel and air. The most important parameter that is characterizing this time is the size of the premixing zone quantified by the so called lift-off height (LOH). Additionally, when employing liquid fuel the lift-off of a flame provides time to achieve better pre-evaporation of the fuel. As a consequence, better mixing of fuel and air helps to avoid high temperature regions that may be a result from an inhomogeneous equivalence ratio distribution. From safety considerations a major advantage of this method compared to the application of a premixing duct is that the risk of hardware destruction by flame flash back can be eliminated. The current work extents the knowledge on lifted flames by the investigation of flames that are generated with an airblast atomizing nozzle that was designed to resemble systems close to application. Lifting of the flame is achieved applying a combination of swirling and non-swirling inflow ducts. A wide range of operating conditions as well as gaseous and liquid fuels are used to investigate their influence on the liftoff height. The lift-off height and location of the reaction zone was determined by means of chemiluminescence of OH~* and it is shown, that the impact of pressure drop and preheating temperature on the LOH is different for gaseous and liquid fuels.
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