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A widely held belief in the combustion community is that the chemical and hydrodynamic structure of a stretched laminar premixed flame can be preserved in a turbulent flow field over a range of conditions collectively known as the flamelet regime, and the homogeneous charge spark-ignition engine combustion falls within the domain of this regime. The major assumption in the laminar flamelet concept as applied to the turbulent premixed flames is that the flame front behaves as a constant-property passive scalar surface, and an increase in the wrinkled flame surface area with increasing turbulence intensity is the dominant mechanism for the observed flame velocity enhancement. The two approaches that have been recently used for estimating a measure of the wrinkled flame surface area in spark-ignition engines and other premixed flames are the flame surface density concept and fractal geometry.

Intermittent and highly transient dense diesel sprays were investigated using laser diffraction and laser sheet illumination techniques to decipher the internal spray structure. Through careful experimental design, the unperturbed structure of the dense core region of a transient full cone diesel spray was observed for the first time. Diffraction measurements showed that larger droplets exist at the spray periphery and the Sauter mean diameter decreases from the periphery to the spray centerline. The results from both laser diffraction and 2-D imaging are inconsistent with the existence of an intact liquid core extending to a few hundred nozzle diameters. The intermittent and highly transient nature of diesel sprays ensures rapid and complete atomization within no more than twenty nozzle diameters.