ABSTRACT The relative enhancements of volume-integrated burning rate and flame surface area under turbulence and heat release rate contributions due to different combustion and flame propagation modes have been compared between conventional and Moderate or Intense Low Oxygen Dilution (MILD) combustion of stratified mixtures (for a global mean equivalence ratio of 0.8) for the first time using three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data. The burning rate enhancement under turbulence is found to be comparable to the enhancement of flame surface area for the conventional stratified flames considered here, whereas the burning rate enhancement is found to be considerably greater than flame area augmentation in the MILD cases analyzed here. It has been found that almost all the heat release rate arises due to the lean-premixed mode of combustion for the conventional stratified flame cases considered here. In contrast, the lean premixed mode of combustion accounts for about 50% of the total heat release rate for the MILD cases where rich-premixed and non-premixed modes of combustion contribute significantly to the overall heat release rate. Under the conditions analyzed here, more than 75% of heat release rate arises from the propagation-dominated regions for both MILD combustion and stratified flame cases, but the trend is stronger in the conventional stratified mixture combustion. More than 80% of heat release rate in the globally lean conventional stratified flame cases considered here originates from back-supported flame propagation, whereas both front and back-supported flame propagation modes have comparable contributions to heat release in the MILD combustion cases. The non-premixed mode of combustion has been found to play a more important role in the MILD combustion cases than in the case of conventional stratified flames. This implies that the closures, which work reasonably well for MILD combustion of homogeneous mixtures, may not be sufficient for modeling of MILD combustion of stratified/inhomogeneous mixtures.
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