Development and Characterization of a Smoke Generator for the Calibration of Aerosol Emissions from Gas Turbine Engines

A smoke generator has been developed that can produce a stable source of aerosol over several hours of continuous operation by pyrolyzing a flowing stream of kerosine vapor in a furnace. This device will be used to generate calibrant aerosols in the study of smoke emissions from gas turbine engines with techniques such as the filter collection method specified by the Society of Automotive Engineers. A differential mobility particle sizer (DMPS) and aerodynamic particle sizer were used to measure particle size distributions from the smoke generator at different kerosine feed rates. Such a combination of techniques covered the size range of ∼0.01–15-μm diameter. The number-size distributions of the submicrometer smoke particles were monitored using the DMPS, and the resulting data were in good agreement with measurements of the projected area circle diameter by scanning electron microscopy and image analysis. Aerosol mass concentrations were calculated by sampling known volumes of aerosol and weighing the mass of material that collected on the filter papers. Both the particle size and concentration characteristics of the aerosol generator were shown to be broadly representative of the smoke emissions from gas turbine engines.