Abstract
CAMPBELL and Woodhead1 discovered that in certain gaseous mixtures, when a detonating type of combustion flashed along a cylindrical tube, the flame front was not simply a disc-like or convex surface, but the detonation spun spiralwise along the tube, giving rise to a banded appearance in the photographs of the luminous products of combustion. Bone and Fraser2 made a careful photographic investigation of the phenomenon, which showed that the initiation of detonation was almost invariably associated with the spin of the ‘head’ of detonation but that in hydrogen mixtures it rapidly disappeared, whereas in certain mixtures it was visible in the ordinary flame before the detonating condition had been reached. They came to the conclusion that the frequency of the spin was fairly independent of the composition of the mixture, of its density and of the speed with which the detonation passed down the tube, but that it depended on the tube diameter such that the pitch of the rotation of the ‘head’ was about three times the tube diameter. Those results were obtained using a 9 in. duralumin drum rotating at 16,000 r.p.m. (equivalent to a film speed of 190 m./sec). The extension of that investigation3, which will be briefly described in this article, has been rendered possible by the use of a special camera whereby photographs could be taken at speeds which would be equivalent to using a film rotating on a drum at 1,000 metres a second, thus enabling events to be recorded which happen during a millionth of a second.
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References
J. Chem. Soc., 3010; 1926.
Phil Trans., A, 230, 363; 1932.
Bone, Wheeler and Fraser, Phil. Trans., A, 235, 29; 1935.
Le Chatelier, C.R., A, 130, 1756; 1900. Egerton and Gates, Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 114, 137; 1927. Bone and Eraser, loc. cit.
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E., A. The Phenomena of Spin in Detonation. Nature 136, 974–976 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136974a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136974a0