Experimental error assessment of laminar flame speed measurements for digital chemical kinetics databases

Abstract This paper focuses on the uncertainty sources in experimental techniques applied for laminar flame speed measurements. The work was motivated due to the necessity to develop flexible standard sets of the key experimental parameters and descriptors to be included in the machine-readable files of digitalized data repositories such as ReSpeTh, PriMe, CloudFlame, etc. Besides identifying and making the data findable through the associated parameterized descriptions, available information should be interoperable with numerical codes evaluating uncertainty of experimental data. These uncertainty boundaries are very important for interpreters of the data and for development of statistical methods applied for the kinetic model optimization. On this way, four most common used techniques – Heat Flux Method (HFM), Bunsen Flame Method (BFM), Spherical Flame Method (SFM) and Counter Flow Method (CFM) were analyzed. The possible sources of experimental uncertainties have been investigated using data published by different research groups. Respective principles and structures of the experimental uncertainty sources for each studied method have been described. The uncertainty sources, their parameters and descriptors have been classified and systematically summarized in a universal data set to be used in the XML files of digitalized data repositories.