The Interaction of High-Speed Turbulence with Flames: Turbulent Flame Speed

Abstract

Abstract : Direct numerical simulations of the interaction of a premixed flame with subsonic, high-speed, homogeneous, isotropic, Kolmogorov-type turbulence in an unconfined system show anomalously high turbulent flame speeds, S(T) . Data from these simulations are analyzed to identify the origin of this anomaly. The simulations were performed with Athena-RFX, a massively parallel, fully compressible, high-order, dimensionally unsplit, reactive-flow code. A simplified reaction-diffusion model represents a stoichiometric H2-air mixture under the assumption of the Lewis number L(e) = 1. Global properties and the internal structure of the flame were analyzed in an earlier paper, which showed that this system represents turbulent combustion in the thin reaction zone regime with the average local flame speed equal to its laminar value, S(L). This paper shows that: (1) Flamelets inside the flame brush have a complex internal structure, in which the isosurfaces of higher fuel mass fractions are folded on progressively smaller scales. (2) Global properties of the turbulent flame are best represented by the structure of the region of peak reaction rate, which defines the flame surface. (3) The observed increase of S(T) relative to S(L) exceeds the corresponding increase of the flame surface area, A(T), relative to the surface area of the planar laminar flame, on average, by 30% and occasionally by as much as 50% in the course of system evolution. This exaggerrated response of S(T) shows that Damkohler's paradigm breaks down for sufficiently high-intensity turbulence, namely at Karlovitz numbers Ka ~ 20, even in the flows characterized by L(e) = 1. (4) The breakdown is the result of tight flame packing by turbulence, which causes frequent flame collisions and formation of regions of high flame curvature 1/ L, or cusps, where L is the thermal width of the laminar flame.