With increasingly tight emission regulations, introduction of alternative fuels or fuel additives potentially derived from biomass, and discussion of combustion regimes at low temperatures and high pressures, combustion chemistry research, already important for conventional fuels and today's combustion characteristics, has gained considerable additional weight. For any of the fuels to be potentially introduced on the market, knowledge of the pollutant spectrum to be expected would be desirable, requiring information on the associated reaction pathways. To establish and validate complete, fully detailed combustion reaction mechanisms, accurate and reliable experimental data are needed from well controlled experiments, so that transfer of the fundamental knowledge into the specific application can be performed, possibly using reduced chemistry. The present plenary lecture and associated paper report several recent examples of combustion chemistry research performed in our group and within collaborations. It highlights some results for flames of C4 hydrocarbons, specifically butane and butene, as well as for flames of selected oxygenated fuels and from combustion experiments at low temperatures. While most of these experimental results discussed here have been recently published elsewhere, new and unpublished results are provided using quantum cascade laser (QCL) absorption spectroscopy, particularly in dimethyl ether (DME) flames that had been characterized with in-situ molecular-beam mass spectrometry (MBMS) before. The potential of this technique for further flame chemistry studies is promising.
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