Morphology and structure of hydrogen–air turbulent premixed flames

Abstract

Direct numerical simulations of turbulent premixed planar flames in the corrugated flamelets and thin reaction zones regimes are analysed to investigate the effect of turbulence on the flame structure and morphology. A tool based on topological invariants called shapefinders, consisting of the planarity and filamentarity, is applied to assess the flame morphology. Several statistics show that the filamentarity, which represents lumped effects of the turbulence on the flame morphology, is closely correlated with the Damköhler number, but not with the Karlovitz number. To investigate which scale of turbulent fluctuations is responsible for the flame morphology evolution, the conditional averages of the Kolmogorov length scale and the Taylor microscale are studied. The conditional averages show strong correlation between the Taylor microscale and the filamentarity, while similar strong correlation is not observed for the Kolmogorov length scale. These results suggest that the turbulence–flame interaction relevant to the flame morphology occurs at the length scale greater than the Taylor microscale for relatively large Damköhler number conditions. The fractal dimension is computed for the DNS and filtered reaction progress variable fields with different filter sizes. The computed fractal dimensions between the resolved and the Taylor-microscale filtered fields are almost identical. Also, it was shown that 93–97% of flame surface area is recovered when the filter size of the Taylor microscale is used. However, this fraction rapidly decreases when the integral length scale is used for the filter size. A similar trend was observed for the flame wrinkling factor.