Numerical Simulation Of Turbulent Combustion Research Articles

Numerical simulations and modeling of turbulent combustion

Turbulent combustion is the basic physical phenomenon responsible for efficient energy release by any internal combustion engine. However it is accompanied by other undesirable phenomena such as noise, pollutant species emission or damaging instabilities that may even lead to the system desctruction. It is then crucial to control this phenomenon, to understand all its mecanisms and to master it in industrial systems. For long time turbulent combustion has been explored only through theory and experiment. But the rapid increase of computers power during the last years has allowed an important development of numerical simulation, that has become today an essential tool for research and technical design. Direct numerical simulation has then allowed to rapidly progress in the knowledge of turbulent flame structures, leading to new modelisations for steady averaged simulations. Recently large eddy simulation has made a new step forward by refining the description of complex and unsteady flames. The main problem that arises when performing numerical simulation of turbulent combustion is linked to the description of the flame front. Being very thin, it can not however be reduced to a simple interface as it is the location of intense chemical transformation and of strong variations of thermodynamical quantities. Capturing the internal structure of a zone with a thickness of the order of 0.1 mm in a computation with a mesh step 10 times larger being impossible, it is necessary to model the turbulent flame. Models depend on the chemical structure of the flame, on the ambiant turbulence, on the combustion regime (flamelets, distributed combustion, etc.) and on the reactants injection mode (premixed or not). One finds then a large class of models, from the most simple algebraic model with a one-step chemical kinetics, to the most complex model involving probablity density functions, cross-correlations and multiple-step or fully complex chemical kinetics.

Direct numerical simulation of turbulent combustion: fundamental insights towards predictive models

The advancement of our basic understanding of turbulent combustion processes and the development of physics-based predictive tools for design and optimization of the next generation of combustion devices are strategic areas of research for the development of a secure, environmentally sound energy infrastructure. In direct numerical simulation (DNS) approaches, all scales of the reacting flow problem are resolved. However, because of the magnitude of this task, DNS of practical high Reynolds number turbulent hydrocarbon flames is out of reach of even terascale computing. For the foreseeable future, the approach to this complex multi-scale problem is to employ distinct but synergistic approaches to tackle smaller sub-ranges of the complete problem, which then require models for the small scale interactions. With full access to the spatially and temporally resolved fields, DNS can play a major role in the development of these models and in the development of fundamental understanding of the micro-physics of turbulence-chemistry interactions. Two examples, from simulations performed at terascale Office of Science computing facilities, are presented to illustrate the role of DNS in delivering new insights to advance the predictive capability of models. Results are presented from new three-dimensional DNS with detailed chemistry of turbulent non-premixed jet flames, revealing the differences between mixing of passive and reacting scalars, and determining an optimal lower dimensional representation of the full thermochemical state space.

The communication performance of the Cray T3D and its effect on iterative solvers

On many distributed memory systems, such as workstation clusters or the Intel iPSC/860, the multigrid algorithm suffers from having extensive communication requirements and, in general, it is not very competitive in comparison to the conjugate gradient algorithm. This is in contrast to the sequential problem whereby the multigrid algorithm is very effective in reducing the global residual, particularly for very large linear systems of equations. These two algorithms are now compared on the Cray T3D for solving very large systems of linear equations (resulted from grids of the order 256 3 cells). The communication performance of the Cray T3D is first measured by the standard ping-pong tests and also by practical communication tasks that are found frequently in CFD calculations. It is found that the Cray T3D has a low latency (≈ 6 μs) and a high bandwidth interprocessor communication (120 MB/s) when the low-level intrinsic communication routines are used. As a result, the multigrid algorithm is found to be very competitive when compared with the conjugate gradient algorithm for solving the very large linear systems arising from the Direct Numerical Simulation of turbulent Combustion (DNSC). Results are contrasted by those on the Intel iPSC/860.

Some applications of Kolmogorov’s turbulence research in the field of combustion

This paper reviews recent developments in understanding of ways in which various characteristic scales in the Kolmogorov energy cascade control the wrinkling and stretching of thin laminar premixed flames in turbulent flows. Some unresolved problems are identified. Results of recent direct numerical simulations of turbulent combustion are discussed. Distributions of flame strain and curvature, obtained from constant density simulations, are presented and a parametrization of these results is suggested. This parametrization is then used to derive a new theoretical model to allow for effects of detailed finite chemical reaction rate mechanisms in engineering calculations of turbulent combustion.