A Calculation and Contour Plotting System for Flame Temperatures

Summary

Details are given of a computer program called FLAME, which plots contours of flame temperatures for a fuel-oxidant-inert system on a triangular diagram. This program can be used to estimate the flammability envelope for such a mixture. The computational parts of the program are based on the STANJAN program which was developed at Stanford University for calculations of equilibrium chemical reaction conditions. The calculations can be carried out under either adiabatic or explosive detonation conditions. They assume ideal gases, pure condensed species and equilibrium thermodynamics. The computer code also includes a contouring algorithm which is specially designed to handle the sharp-cornered contours which occur in some flame temperature diagrams. Three examples of computed flammability diagrams are given.