This equipment grant will be used for acquisition of a laser diagnostics imaging system for research important to development of better understanding and modeling of turbulent combustion. This system, which employs an intensified CCD camera and an aberration-corrected monochromator in a two- dimensional multiplexed detection scheme to simultaneously detect spectral and spatial information, greatly reduces data acquisition time for characterization of strained laminar flames by enabling the acquisition of simultaneous spectra at multiple locations in such flames, removing the need for spatial scanning. This imaging equipment will play a key role in a comprehensive program to construct and test "libraries" of experimentally measured properties of strained laminar flamelets for use in turbulent combustion modeling and engine simulations. Such data is currently being collected using non-intrusive laser diagnostics to measure spatially resolved temperature, velocity, and species concentration profiles in well- controlled counterflowing premixed diffusion flames; however, the current research is hampered by the massive amount of data required for each "library" and the time required to obtain it. (For a given fuel, measurements are required for a wide range of strain rates, pressures, temperatures, and equivalence ratios.) This improvement will make possible the construction of experimental laminar flamelet libraries for accurate modeling of turbulent combustion of realistic fuels for which kinetic schemes are not yet available.
