Preface

Of prime concern in this book are combustion systems – confined fields of compressible fluids where exothermic processes of combustion take place. Their purpose is to generate motive power. In their course, exothermic energy* is created by chemical reaction and deposited in the field, both actions carried out concomitantly and referred to popularly as ’heat release.’ Particular examples of such systems are cylinders in internal combustion engines, combustors of gas turbines and rockets, as well as explosions engendering blast waves non-steady flow fields bounded by incident shock fronts that impose on them the constraints of confinement. The process of combustion is carried out, as a rule, at a high rate, the life time of chemically reacting component being of an order of microseconds, while the exothermic reaction of the whole system is accomplished in few milliseconds. For that reason, its execution has been considered so far to be beyond the intervention of interactive controls – a hindrance that, in our age of microelectronics for which a millisecond is a relatively long time, can be eliminated. The technological objective of the book is to pave the way towards this end by bringing forth the dynamic features of combustion systems. Their properties are expressed therefore as those of dynamic objects – entities amenable to management by modern tools of control technology. Sensible properties of combustion systems are displayed in a threedimensional physical space, while their processes are disclosed in a multidimensional thermo-physical phase space, where the states of components of the working substance are identified and the transformations of its constituents are disclosed. The dimension of the latter is equal to the degrees of freedom the number of reaction constituents plus two, as specified by the Gibbs phase rule.