Sooting flame thermometry using emission/absorption tomography

A sooting flame temperature measurement technique has been demonstrated based on emission-absorption tomography. The approach applies the algorithms of Fourier transform tomography to deconvolve local soot absorption coefficient and Planck function (temperature) from sets of parallel line-of-sight measurements. The technique has the advantage that it is experimentally simple and does not require involved data reduction. For small particles, there is also no sensitivity of the inferred temperature to possibly uncertain medium parameters. Its main limitation seems to be that it will not work well for vanishingly small absorption, but this could be overcome in practice by seeding and then performing all work at the wavelength of a seed resonance. While in principle limited to optically thin flames, accurate corrections for moderate optical thickness can often be made. A self-consistent comparison of measured global radiation from a sooting ethylene flame with a radiative transfer calculation based on measured temperature and soot absorption parameters has been performed.