High-order Implicit Large Eddy Simulation of gaseous fuel injection and mixing of a bluff body burner

Abstract

Implicit Large Eddy Simulation (ILES) with high-resolution and high-order computational modelling was applied to a turbulent mixing fuel injector flow. In the ILES calculation, the governing equations for three dimensional, non-reactive, multi-species compressible flows were solved using a finite volume Godunov-type method. Up to ninth-order spatial accurate reconstruction methods were examined with a second order explicit Runge–Kutta time integration. Mean and root mean square velocity and mixture fraction profiles showed good agreement with experimental data, which demonstrated that ILES using high-order methods successfully captured complex turbulent flow structure without using an explicit subgrid scale model. The effects of grid resolution and the influence of order of spatial accuracy on the resolution of the kinetic energy spectrum were investigated. An k −5/3 decay of energy could be seen in a certain range and the cut-off wavenumbers increased with grid resolution or order of spatial accuracy. The effective cut-off wavenumbers are shown to be larger than the maximum wavenumbers appearing on the given grid for all test cases, implying that the numerical dissipation represents sufficiently the energy transport between resolved and unresolved eddies. The fifth-order limiter with a 0.6 million grid points was found to be optimal in terms of the resolution of kinetic energy and reasonable computational time.