Bryan W. Weber
Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269

Chih-Jen Sung
Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269

Video: https://youtu.be/tsjqkIAh8cw

Abstract

The ignition delay of a fuel/air mixture is an important quantity in designing combustion devices, and these data are also used to validate computational kinetic models for combustion. One of the typical experimental devices used to measure the ignition delay is called a Rapid Compression Machine (RCM). This paper presents UConnRCMPy, an open-source Python package to process experimental data from the RCM at the University of Connecticut. Given an experimental measurement, UConnRCMPy computes the thermodynamic conditions in the reaction chamber of the RCM during an experiment along with the ignition delay. UConnRCMPy relies on several packages from the SciPy stack and the broader scientific Python community. UConnRCMPy implements an extensible framework, so that alternative experimental data formats can be incorporated easily. In this way, UConnRCMPy improves the consistency of RCM data processing and enables reproducible analysis of the data.

Keywords

rapid compression machine, engineering, kinetic models

DOI

10.25080/Majora-629e541a-005

Bibtex entry

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Copyright © 2016 Bryan W. Weber et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.