Upper Pressure Limit of Ignition

Abstract

I THINK it most useful that different lines of attack should be compared and contrasted, and am very pleased to associate myself with the publication of the above note. My indebtedness to the general ideas of Semenoff has been acknowledged passim, though in the present instance I must remark that the upper limit of the hydrogen-oxygen reaction was discussed by Hinshelwood and Thompson in 1929¹, where the theory of some kind of gas phase deactivation was put forward and the fact that chain breaking must depend upon a higher power of concentration than chain starting was implicitly taken into account. The paper of Grant and Hinshelwood contained a quantitative re-investigation of the matter, yielding what seemed definite proof of the ternary collision hypothesis. With regard to the third point in the above letter, it should be remarked that Grant and Hinshelwood explained the influence of temperature on the lower limit, at least to their own satisfaction.