Characteristics of turbulent premixed flames were investigated experimentally. The investigations were performed using Mie scattering, Particle Image Velocimetry, Rayleigh scattering, and broad-band luminosity imaging techniques. Methane-air flames associated with a relatively wide range of turbulence intensities, fuel-air equivalence ratios, and mean bulk flow velocities were investigated. For a relatively moderate value of turbulence intensity, a new concept is introduced and utilized to provide a detailed description associated with interaction of turbulent flow and flame front. The concept pertains to reactants velocity estimated at the vicinity of the flame front and is referred to as the edge velocity. Specifically, it is shown that fluctuations of the flame front position are induced by fluctuations of the edge velocity. For a relatively wide range of turbulence intensity, several characteristics of turbulent premixed flames, namely, front topology, brush thickness, surface density, and consumption speeds are investigated. For the first time, several flame front structures are identified and studied. It is shown that, due to formation of these front structures, the regime of turbulent premixed combustion transitions from the regime of counter-gradient diffusion to that of the gradient diffusion. In addition to these, a comprehensive study is performed to investigate influence of flame configuration on several flame front characteristics. It is obtained that, although changing the flame configuration influences several flame characteristics, the trends associated with the effects of governing parameters on the characteristics are nearly independent of the flame configuration.

A methodology for investigating premixed turbulent flames propagating in intense isotropic turbulence has been developed. The burner uses a turbulence generator developed by Videto and Santavicca and the flame is stabilized by weak-swirl generated by air injectors. This set-up produces stable premixed turbulent flames under a wide range of mixture conditions and turbulence intensities. The experiments are designed to investigate systematically the changes in flame structures for conditions which can be classified as wrinkled laminar flames, corrugated flames and flames with distributed reaction zones. Laser Doppler anemometry and Rayleigh scattering techniques are used to determine the turbulence and scalar statistics. In the intense turbulence, the flames are found to produce very little changes in the mean and rams velocities. Their flame speed increase linearly with turbulence intensity as for wrinkled laminar flames. The Rayleigh scattering pdfs for flames within the distributed reaction zone regime are distinctly bimodal. The probabilities of the reacting states (i.e. contributions from within the reaction zone) is not higher than those of wrinkled laminar flame. These results show that there is no drastic changes in flame structures at Karlovitz number close to unity. This suggest that the Klimov-Williams criterion under-predicts the resilience of wrinkled flamelets to intense turbulence.