Premixed flame

Summary

A premixed flame is a thin reaction zone that travels into a mixture in which fuel and oxidiser are already mixed. The flame moves because heat from the reaction diffuses ahead and ignites the fresh gas. For a planar flame this is a travelling wave of a reaction–diffusion system. Its speed, the laminar burning velocity, is a property of the mixture. It is one of the two basic flame types of combustion theory; the other is the diffusion flame, such as the Burke–Schumann flame.