Sparse, iterative simulation methods for one-dimensional laminar flames

Abstract

Sparse, iterative simulation methods for one-dimensional laminar flames are proposed. The resulting steady and unsteady flame solvers exploit approximate Jacobians to greatly reduce the computational cost associated with matrix operations. The constant, non-unity Lewis number assumption is introduced to further reduce the computational cost. The solvers are also parallelized to reduce time-to-solution on distributed memory computer systems. Computed laminar flame speeds and species profiles for a range of chemical mechanisms (from 10 to 2878 species) are compared against a well-validated commercial code and are found to be consistent within solver tolerances. The computation times of both the unsteady and steady solutions increase only linearly with the number of species, which is a significant improvement over the quadratic or cubic scaling of existing steady-state flame solvers. For the largest mechanism tested, the steady-state flame solver is two orders of magnitude faster than commonly-used codes. The use of an approximate Jacobian is shown to reduce the rate of convergence for the steady-state solver, but does not significantly affect the domain of convergence. The steady-state solver with approximate Jacobian is thus well suited for computationally efficient laminar flame speed sweeps with large kinetic mechanisms.