[TheForge] Sidearm burners, Murphy burners & blown burners

[Bruce Freeman]

Of course, given sufficient TIME, gases will mix thoroughly.  Apparently, burner design can be largely dependent upon getting gases to mix in the very brief time between their coming in contact at all and the beginning of combustion.

Traditionally, that has been a very short time for a very good reason:  Once propane mixes with air, you've got an explosion waiting to happen.   It makes me wonder, though, whether one could mix propane and air thoroughly under conditions in which they could not possibly explode, and then move them into the burn area.  

Imagine a fairly large metallic frit - little beads of metal fused together to form a porous mass.  (This stuff exists and is commonly used for filters.)  If within such a material you had a combustable mixture of air and propane, it wouldn't burn (I think) because it could not easily reach ignition temperature - the frit would suck the heat away.  (Maybe the outside of this frit would have to be finned, or even actively cooled, say, by expansion of liquid propane.)  Hence, in principal there'd be time to effect complete mixing.

Bruce
NJ

>>> frosty at customcpu.com 2/14/2007 3:03 PM >>>
 The problem though is propane 
and air don't mix easily