A novel high temperature 1H NMR imaging probe for combustion studies: the behaviour of both a lit and unlit methane gas jet.

The design of a NMR probe suitable for very high temperature samples is described. The loop gap resonator is water cooled and tuned to 100 MHz for use in a 2.4 T horizontal bore magnet. The probe has been specifically designed for imaging of the combustion process. An experiment is described in this paper which shows the behaviour of a methane gas jet when both lit and unlit. The jet of gas may be observed in its unlit state flowing at up to 2 ms(-1) from a 1 mm diameter orifice using a Single Point Imaging technique. Images of the lit gas show loss of nuclear polarisation within 3 mm of the orifice. A residual amount of un-decomposed gas is visible in the first few millimetres of the flame neck. A computational fluid dynamics model is used to verify the distribution of molecular methane, as well as the temperature of the flame.