Programmable driving boards of Xenon flash lamps for photo-Ignition process of Carbon Nanotubes added to Air/Methane fuel mixture

This paper describes the design and testing of programmable driving boards for turning on Xenon flash lamps, with the aim to photo-ignite a gaseous fuel/air mixture enriched with Multi-walled carbon nanotubes with added metal impurities, makers of photo-ignition process. The key factor of realized electronic boards is the availability to adjust the triggering parameters of pulsed Xe lamps, allowing to fully characterize the combustion process under investigation. By using the designed PC-configurable boards in the realized experimental setups, the effects of Xenon light source’s parameters such as pulse luminous intensity, flash-rate and time duration have been investigated in order to find the needed light energy/power to ignite MWCNT/Fe mixtures with different weight ratio (from 1:4 to 4:1). Experimental results show that lower energy thresholds are required with increasing MWCNTs amount respect to ferrocene.