Increasing the efficiency of postprocessing for turbulent reacting flows

Abstract

Turbulent combustion of fossil fuels is nowadays still by far the most important process to cover the worldwide energy needs. Furthermore, turbulent flames are widely used in a wealth of practical applications. Nevertheless, fundamental aspects of turbulent combustion are still poorly understood due to the complexity of the underlying, individual physical processes and due to their complex nonlinear coupling. In order to improve combustion processes, two complementary means are classically used: experimental investigations and numerical simulations. Both lead nowadays to a huge quantity of raw data. In order to extract all useful information from these data, a library containing essential postprocessing methods has been developed: it contains numerous tools to analyze and visualize 2D and 3D flames and flow fields, to investigate geometry and structure of flames both locally and globally, to quantify the interaction between flow fields and flames, and to determine statistics and correlations of all variables that are essential for model development. This library has been coded using scripts implemented into the MatLab platform. Available tools and illustrative examples are described in this paper in order to demonstrate the interest of this approach.