Candles have cast a light on man’s progress for centuries not merely as a lighting source but also in the understanding of the fundamental combustion process. A candle flame with its fascinating lights, and mysterious and phantasmagoric inner structures, has been a research topic for about 400 years, from Francis Bacon’s first combustion experiment by probing the
candle flame structure in 1620 to Michael Faraday’s series of lectures on the chemical history of a candle in 1860, 1 and to the investigation of flame characteristics at microgravity in the
space shuttle and the Mir Station in recent years. 2 Unfortunately, the research of nanoparticles in candle flame is still difficult because the existing sampling methods 3–6 are either insensitive
to the nanoparticles or unable to prevent the nanoparticles from further reaction.
A candle flame shows one of the most complex combustion processes due to its multiphasic nature and complex fuel compositions, CnH2n+2 (n = 19 to 36), leading to rich carboneous
structures in its heavy soot. 7,8 The study of soot formation and destruction mechanisms will be beneficial not only to the reduction of environmental pollution and improvement of combustion efficiency, but also to the nanoparticle growth through combustion synthesis, which is equally important and has received tremendous attention in recent years. 9 Soot formation in the combustion process has been investigated extensively in the past decades. 10–14 Analytical techniques including Raman spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) have greatly improved the knowledge about the structures of soot particles. 15–17 In the present work, a new sampling technique using ultrathin porous anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) foils to capture soot particles in a candle flame has been developed, followed by high resolution
TEM (HRTEM) characterisation.
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