MILD (Moderate or Intense Low-Oxygen Dilution) Combustion

Dear Colleagues,

Across fire science and fire-related technologies, many critical scenarios involve high-temperature, low-oxygen, highly diluted conditions, from underventilated compartment fires and industrial heating to emerging hydrogen and ammonia systems. In these regimes, heat release can become spatially distributed rather than flame-front-dominated. Moderate or Intense Low-Oxygen Dilution (MILD), flameless combustion/HiTAC, and colorless distributed combustion (CDC) demonstrate uniform temperature fields, stable operation over wide equivalence ratios, and ultra-low NOx/soot values. Understanding and exploiting distributed reaction zones can inform safer, cleaner fire-related technologies, improve industrial furnace/kiln performance, and support fuel transitions. Cross-fertilization with fire dynamics (ignition, transition, extinction, radiative exchange, ventilation effects) and modern measurement/analytics can accelerate both scientific understanding and real-world impacts. We lack an integrated, fire-centric view of distributed combustion that couples validated models with high-fidelity measurements under high-T/low-O₂, quantifies uncertainty, and translates fundamentals to design, control, and safety guidelines. For this Special Issue, we invite the submission of rigorous studies that fill in these gaps and provide actionable knowledge, benchmarks, and datasets for the fire community.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Fundamentals of MILD/HiTAC/CDC and ignition/transition/extinction in diluted, preheated oxidizers;
• Fire dynamics links: underventilated/vent-limited conditions, radiation–mixing interplay, and stability/flashback;
• Diagnostics and thermal metrology: temperature/emissivity, IR/hyperspectral, chemiluminescence/PLIF, PIV/schlieren, calibration, and uncertainty;
• AI-driven analysis: data assimilation, reduced-order/surrogate models, super-resolution, sensor fusion, and anomaly detection;
• Modeling and validation: LES/DNS/RANS, detailed/reduced kinetics, radiation, UQ/reproducibility, and open datasets;
• Fuels and emissions: hydrogen, ammonia, biofuels, blends, ultra-low-NOx/CO/soot strategies, and safety implications;
• Applications: industrial furnaces/ovens/kilns and gas turbine-relevant systems, control/retrofit case studies, and TEA/LCA where relevant.

Dr. Yufeng Lai
Dr. Jiansheng Yang
Prof. Dr. Yang Zhang
Guest Editors

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