Turbulent Non-premixed Flames Research Articles

Opposed jet burner and Tsuji burner for representative laminar flamelet with differential molecular diffusion for non-premixed combustion modeling

Modeling differential molecular diffusion in turbulent non-premixed combustion remains challenging for flamelet models. Laminar flamelet is a key building block of flamelet models for turbulent combustion. One significant challenge that has not been adequately addressed is the representativity of laminar flamelet for the characteristics of differential molecular diffusion in turbulent combustion. Laminar flamelet is typically generated based on two conceptual burner configurations, the opposed jet burner and the Tsuji burner. The two burners are commonly viewed to be equivalent for the description of laminar flamelet structures. In this work, a major difference between them is revealed for the first time when they are used to represent differential molecular diffusion. The traditional opposed jet burner yields almost fixed equal diffusion locations defined as the points with equal values of mixture fractions based on different elements in the mixture fraction space. The Tsuji burner, with a slight extension, can produce a continuous variation of the equal diffusion locations in the mixture fraction space. This variation of the equal diffusion locations is shown to be an important feature of non-premixed combustion, as demonstrated in a laminar jet mixing layer, a turbulent jet mixing layer, and a turbulent jet non-premixed flame. Theoretical analysis is conducted based on an idealized opposed jet mixing layer to identify the major cause of the difference between the two burners. It is found that the inlet diffusion caused the major difference in differential molecular diffusion in the two burners. The curvature difference, another main difference between the two burners, however, is not found to cause any major difference in differential molecular diffusion in the two burners. Based on the finding, a modified opposed jet burner with disabled inlet diffusion is introduced and is shown to be able to reproduce the feature of differential molecular diffusion observed in the Tsuji burner. Both burners, after properly generalized with suitable boundary conditions and additional parameters (like the velocity ratio of fuel and oxidizer), are expected to be suitable and equivalent choices for the generation of representative laminar flamelets that can be used eventually in flamelet modeling of differential molecular diffusion in turbulent non-premixed combustion.Novelty and significance statement: (1) A significant difference between the opposed jet burner and the Tsuji burner is revealed for generating representative laminar flamelet with differential molecular diffusion (under specific conditions); (2) The flamelet generated from the Tsuji burner is shown to be representative of differential molecular diffusion found in practically relevant mixing and combustion problems; (3) The treatment of inlet diffusion is identified to be the major cause of the difference observed between the two burners; (4) Modifications are introduced to the opposed jet burner to reconcile the two different burners for producing representative flamelet that can be used in the modeling of differential molecular diffusion in turbulent non-premixed combustion.

Characterizing turbulent non-premixed flame structure and pollutant formation of cracked ammonia jet flames using simultaneous NH and NO PLIF

The combustion of cracked ammonia is crucial for enhancing flame stability and reducing pollutant emissions in ammonia-based combustion systems. This study investigated the flame structure and pollutant formation in cracked ammonia jet flames (CAJFs) to improve our understanding of the turbulence-chemistry interactions in ammonia combustion. A simultaneous NH and NO planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique was employed to analyze the flame structure of turbulent non-premixed CAJFs, emulated using ammonia-hydrogen–nitrogen mixtures. Experimental measurements were conducted across a range of pressures (1–5 bar) and cracking ratios (7 %-28 %). The results revealed the significant influence of the cracking ratio on the chemical reactivity and NH-layer characteristics of ammonia-hydrogen flames. NH effectively marked the heat release layer of CAJFs. Reducing the cracking ratio from 28 % to 7 % resulted in increased local extinction-induced NH-layer fragmentation and reduced reaction area. The reaction layer thickness exhibited low sensitivity to the cracking ratio and pressure, while the broadening of the NH layer displayed a slowdown pattern with increasing height, differing from premixed flames. The pollutant NO rapidly formed within the reaction zone, persisting in the outer hot products until reduced by turbulent mixing. The fragmented flame structure promoted decreased NO formation and potentially lower NO concentration. A novel approach of multiplying NH and NO was proposed to reflect the formation characteristics of another important pollutant N2O. The effect of turbulent disturbances on N2O formation needs to be considered in turbulent CAJFs because N2O formation is strongly suppressed when turbulent transport reduces local NO concentration. This research enhances understanding of turbulence-chemistry interactions in cracked ammonia combustion, benefiting ammonia flame stability and pollutant emission control.

Radiating biofuel-blended turbulent nonpremixed hydrogen flames on a coaxial spray burner

The low radiant intensity and luminosity of hydrogen flames can be enhanced by the addition of a small portion of sooting biofuels. To achieve higher effectiveness, the impact of blending turbulent nonpremixed hydrogen flames with liquid biofuels, by gas-assist atomisation, is investigated and compared with the introduction methods of prevapourisation and ultrasonic spray. The flame appearance, luminosity, radiant fraction, centreline temperature, and the near-field spray characteristics of four biofuel surrogates (eucalyptol, D-limonene, guaiacol, and anisole) blended into hydrogen flames are measured experimentally. Radiating biofuel/hydrogen flames are achieved on a coaxial needle spray burner by the addition of 0.1–0.3 mol% biofuel surrogates. Compared with the unblended hydrogen flame, the luminosity and radiant fraction are enhanced by 30%–500% and 2%–15%, respectively, with the addition of biofuel surrogates. The results show that adding the biofuel surrogates by gas-assist atomisation is more effective than prevapourisation and ultrasonic atomisation in luminosity and radiant fraction enhancement. It is found that the local fuel-rich conditions, which are beneficial for soot formation, are further facilitated by the larger droplets and spray objects generated by gas-assist atomisation. Of the additives tested, anisole is the most effective for luminosity and radiant fraction enhancement of a hydrogen flame while exhibiting the largest flame temperature drop due to the enthalpy of vapourisation and the radiative loss from the promoted soot formation. The viscosity and surface tension greatly influence the spray characteristics which in turn impacts the flame characteristics. Guaiacol, the representative of lignin, appears to have the lowest effectiveness in radiant fraction enhancement due to the presence of a hydroxy group, a higher bond dissociation enthalpy, and a coarser spray ascribed to higher viscosity and surface tension.

Advanced numerical simulation of hydrogen/air turbulent non-premixed flame on model burner

A numerical investigation of hydrogen (H2)/air turbulent non-premixed flame on the model burner was conducted. A large eddy simulation of reacting flow with partial and detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms was employed to obtain a high-resolution and accurate prediction of thermochemical states inside the combustion chamber, including pollutant NO, which have not been adequately predicted until now. This study employed temperature and species mass fraction data from two combustion cases of fully developed turbulent and transition regimes with a fuel composition of 50 % H2 and 50 % N2, experimentally measured by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and TU Darmstadt. A reactor-based partially-stirred reactor (PaSR) model was used to handle the turbulence chemistry interaction. The employed chemical mechanisms included GRI-Mech 3.0 and partial Mevel mechanism. The effects of chemical mechanism and inlet jet velocity on simulation accuracy were discussed. The more elaborative nitrogen reactions in GRI-Mech 3.0 result in a better NO prediction compared to the partial Mevel mechanism. The implementation of finite rate chemistry in a PaSR model yields a significantly improved prediction of NO from the flamelet probability density function approach with less than 1 % root mean square deviation from experimental data. The performed simulation successfully captured the thermochemical profile of a fully developed turbulent flame; however, further improvement on boundary condition modeling is still required for a flame undergoing a transition from laminar to turbulent regimes. Finally, using the partial Mevel mechanism leads to a computational cost reduction of 32.66 % compared to the GRI-Mech 3.0 mechanism, which confirms the proportional relation between the size of the mechanism and computational cost.

Influence of velocity on the transient auto-ignition of ethylene jet in a hot coflow

The difficulty of ignition is one of the main problems in the combustion chamber of the air-breathing combined engine. Based on this, the transient auto-ignition in the turbulent non-premixed flames of ethylene in a high-speed jet in hot coflow was studied using a newly developed burner. High-speed hydroxyl (OH) planar laser-induced fluorescence (up to 10 kHz) and large eddy simulations (LES) were performed to investigate the auto-ignition process. The experimental conditions included injection velocities of 334–491 m/s, and the effect of jet velocity on the mixing process, ignition process, and flame stabilization mechanisms were investigated. The results showed that the numerical simulation results were consistent with the experimental data. The velocity could affect the auto-ignition position, whereas it had no effect on the auto-ignition time. The increase in fuel jet velocity is beneficial to the mixing of fuel and high-temperature gas and helps to increase the premixed combustion zone during the formation of fire kernels. Moreover, as the velocity increased, the flame status changed from a transitional flame to a lifted flame, the growth rates of the flame volume and total heat release increased, and the flame stabilization mechanism changed from flame propagation to auto-ignition.

Machine learning tabulation of thermochemistry for turbulent dimethyl ether (DME) flames

The present work applies a machine learning tabulation methodology for the thermochemistry of dimethyl ether (DME), a typical biodiesel fuel, to accelerate the real-time computation of a large-size DME mechanism in turbulent non-premixed combustion. This approach is known as the hybrid flamelet/random data and multiple multilayer perceptrons (HFRD-MMLP) method (Ding et al., 2021). The essence of the HFRD-MMLP method lies in the generation of training data using the HFRD approach, which enhances the capacity of generalisation for the reactive composition space encountered in practical turbulent combustion by using the random process to expand the training dataset from laminar flamelets. The MMLP artificial neural networks (ANNs) are then trained to predict different composition states, aiming to improve the accuracy of ANN predictions. To validate the effectiveness of the ANNs, they are initially tested on 1-D laminar flame simulations with varying strain rates. Subsequently, a test is conducted on Sandia non-premixed turbulent DME series flames D and F, with an increasing jet Reynolds Number. The results regarding species mole fractions and temperature show overall excellent agreement with the direct integration method. The HFRD-MMLP method achieves speed-up factors of over 16 and 10 for the reaction step, and total computational costs, respectively, in the LES-PDF simulation with the DME mechanism in this work, surpassing the speed-up factors of approximately 12–14, and below 5 for the reaction step, and total time costs, respectively, in previous works on GRI-1.2 mechanism for CH4 (Ding et al., 2021) and CH4/H2 (Ding et al., 2022) combustion. This indicates that the HRFD-MMLP method is highly effective for mechanisms of large size in reducing the computational cost by avoiding a significant number of highly stiff ordinary differential equations (ODEs) integration. This approach can be applied in real-time calculations of reaction source terms in methods including Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), Probability Density Function (PDF) methods, unsteady flamelet, Conditional Moment Closure (CMC), Multiple Mapping Closure (MMC), Linear Eddy Model (LEM), Thickened Flame Model, the Partially Stirred Reactor (PaSR) method (as in OpenFOAM) and laminar flame computation.

A detailed of analysis of joint soot volume fraction/temperature statistics in non-premixed jet flame: Implication for soot emission turbulence/radiation interaction

The main objective of this study is to provide insights on the modelling of soot emission Turbulence Radiation Interaction (TRI) through a detailed analysis of the joint SVF/temperature statistics in turbulent non-premixed flames. The analysis relies on RANS/Transported Probability Density Function (TPDF) simulation of the Sandia ethylene jet turbulent non-premixed flame. RANS/TPDF predictions reproduce with fidelity the exhaustive set of experimental data, namely the flame structure, the soot and temperature statistics including the soot intermittency, and the radiative outputs. The marginal PDF of SVF exhibits the typical shape of an intermittent process and can be decomposed into a non-sooting mode and a sooting mode, with this latter being reasonably represented by a truncated Gaussian PDF. As expected, the marginal PDF of temperature can be reasonably represented by a clipped Gaussian PDF whereas that of the soot temperature follows a significantly narrower PDF as soot is fully oxidized in the fuel rich side of the flame. Analysis of the joint SVF/temperature PDF shows that both SVF/temperature and SVF/soot temperature first-order cross correlations are positive in the soot formation region and becomes strongly negative in the region of strong soot emission. The TPDF predictions are analysed a priori to design a new joint presumed PDF (PPDF) of SVF and temperature through the Gaussian copula. The Gaussian copula-based PPDF depends on six parameters, namely the five related to the marginal PDFs of SVF and temperature added to the first-order cross-correlation coefficient of SVF and temperature. Mean soot emission term computed with the copula-based PPDF agrees very well with the reference TPDF solution over the entire flame and improves significantly the solutions obtained by neglecting either TRI or the correlation between SVF and temperature. These results indicate that the Gaussian copula-based joint PPDF model is a good candidate to interpret soot emission-related experimental data in turbulent non-premixed flames.

Deep Learning of Joint Scalar PDFs in Turbulent Flames from Sparse Multiscalar Data

ABSTRACT We investigate the reconstruction of multi-dimensional joint scalar probability density functions starting with sparse multiscalar data in turbulent flames using deep operator networks (DeepONets). The formulation is based on 1) a dimensionality reduction to reduce the complexity of modeling the PDF using principal component analysis (PCA), and 2) the implementation of the deep operator neural network (or DeepONet) to construct a generalizable joint PDF of the principal components (PCs). We demonstrate the accuracy and generalizability of the DeepONet on the Sandia turbulent non-premixed flames D, E and F where the DeepONet is trained on data for flame E and is evaluated for the 3 flames. The DeepONet-based approach is able to construct multiple PDF shapes based on the PCs for all conditions. Combined with a recently proposed method for evaluating thermochemical scalar means conditioned on the PCs, the convolution of these means with the joint PDFs yields good predictions of thermochemical scalars’ unconditional means profiles in the flames.

Modeling Edge Flame Propagation for Flame Particle Tracking in the Forced Ignition Process of Turbulent Nonpremixed Jet Flame

ABSTRACT To ensure safe and reliable operation, ignition performance in propulsion and power devices needs to be thoroughly assessed. Reduced order models (ROMs) for ignition have gained increasing attention, given that first-principles models are restricted by immense computational costs that preclude rapid assessment for the design purpose. Currently, flame self-propagation is generally neglected in the ROM descriptions of ignition process and the impact on the flame front dynamics as well as the ignition probability map is not clear for low swirl or jet flames which are of interest for industrial applications. In this study, an empirical model for flame self-propagation is proposed to augment the capability of Lagrangian flame particle tracking method, a ROM model to predict ignition probability based on nonreacting flow field. The model adopts the classic scaling law of turbulent flame speed together with fuel gradient correction and flame self-propagation to mimic the edge flame dynamics during the ignition process. The model performances in terms of flame front dynamics and ignition probability map are quantified in a turbulent nonpremixed methane-air jet flame. Results reveal that only with flame self-propagation, the flame particle tracking can well capture the transient evolution of the leading flame front as observed in experiments. It is found that the predicted ignition probability map agrees well with experimental data with high ignition probability around the vicinity of the stoichiometric region at the downstream axial distance of 6 to 40 times the jet diameter. This study illustrates the importance to account for flame self-propagation to correctly predict ignition probability in jet dominant nonpremixed flames.

Characterisation of turbulent non-premixed hydrogen-blended flames in a scaled industrial low-swirl burner

The performance of a scaled industrial, non-premixed, low-swirl burner design was experimentally investigated for hydrogen addition to natural gas. Two strategies for introducing hydrogen are considered, namely, conserving (i) heat input and (ii) velocity/volumetric flow of the original fuel. This work characterises the effects on key performance metrics of the burner as hydrogen fraction is increased. Compared with natural gas, the results with hydrogen showed a 33 % reduction in the radiant fraction and up to a 380 % increase in NOx emissions. The lift-off height was reduced by a maximum of 23 % and 51 % for addition of 10 and 30 vol% hydrogen addition, respectively, with 100 % cases becoming completely attached to the burner. The influence of hydrogen-addition strategy and air adjustment was shown to be significant with respect to NOx emissions but less significant than the resulting changes in fuel composition and heat input with respect to flame appearance, stability and radiant heat transfer.

LES investigation of soot formation in a turbulent non-premixed jet flame with sectional method and FGM chemistry

This study proposes a detailed soot modeling framework for large-eddy simulation (LES) to accurately predict soot formation and particle size distributions (PSD) in turbulent reacting flows. The framework incorporates Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) chemistry and a soot model based on the discrete sectional method (DSM) to predict both qualitative and quantitative sooting behavior while keeping the computational cost affordable. Two elementary modeling strategies are considered in the LES formalism for describing soot formation rates. These strategies rely on an a-priori tabulation of soot formation rates and their run-time computation. The LES formalism is applied to the simulations of a well-characterized, non-premixed, turbulent jet flame. A comparative analysis of strategies employed for filtered soot source term treatment is conducted to investigate their impact on the prediction of soot quantities and the evolution of soot PSDs. The LES results for the gas phase and soot phase are compared against the available experimental data. A good prediction of soot evolution is achieved with the two methodologies. The tabulation of soot formation rates leads to a significant reduction in computational cost compared to the model based on their explicit runtime computation. The LES results reveal that the modeling of filtered soot source terms has a significant impact on the quantitative prediction of soot formation. The possible reasons for the observed differences in the soot prediction are discussed. The run-time computation-based model provides a more consistent treatment of the non-linear interactions between the gas and soot phases in soot source terms compared to the tabulated soot chemistry approach. On the other hand, the tabulated soot chemistry model is an interesting and efficient modeling approach for predicting soot formation in turbulent conditions. Overall, both approaches have their strengths and limitations, and the choice of approach may depend on the specific needs of the application.

The Effects of Cracking Ratio on Ammonia/Air Non-Premixed Flames under High-Pressure Conditions Using Large Eddy Simulations

Ammonia is a promising carbon-free fuel. However, one of the main challenges for ammonia combustion is the high level of NO emissions. In this study, simulations were conducted for ammonia/air laminar counterflow flames and turbulent non-premixed jet flames in the KAUST high-pressure combustion duct (HPCD) at a pressure of 5 bar, with two ammonia cracking ratios of 14% and 28%. The influence of ammonia cracking ratio on the flame structure and NO formation mechanism were examined. The laminar counterflow flame results showed that HNO is one of the most critical species related to NO formation and NO is mainly generated through the path of NH2→NH→HNO→NO. For the turbulent flames, the flamelet/progress variable (FPV) approach was employed in the context of large eddy simulations (LES) for high-fidelity simulations. The simulation results were compared with the measured data with promising agreements, which proves the accuracy of the FPV method for the present flames. It was shown that with increasing cracking ratio, not only the flame reactivity is enhanced, but also the generation of NO is increased. The correlation between NO and HNO is weaker when compared to that between NO and radicals such as O, H and OH in the entire flame. Through the distribution of NO source terms, it was found that the NO source term has a higher absolute value in the upstream region and the absolute value rapidly decreases with increasing streamwise distance. The total NO source term is positive in the fuel-lean zone and shows negative values in the fuel-rich zone.

Turbulence effects on the formation and growth of nano-particles in three-dimensional premixed and non-premixed flames

This study examines the impact of turbulence on particle-forming flames via three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. The simulations employ the finite rate chemistry approach to simulate both premixed and non-premixed methane-air turbulent planar jet flames. These flames are doped with titanium tetraisopropoxide (TTIP) to form titanium dioxide TiO2 nanoparticles. The sectional model is employed to solve the population balance equation governing particle dynamics. Through these simulations, a number of the Batchelor scales pertaining to the smaller nanoparticle structures are effectively captured. The analysis conducted on these simulations is to identify and quantify the respective influences of diffusion, coagulation, and inception on variations in particle concentration across different regions within the flame. Several regions of the computational domain with different turbulence intensities are analyzed. Results show that the physical mechanisms that contribute to particle growth are not negligible on the particle concentrations. The impact of normal aN and tangential aT strain rates, which govern the thickness of particle-loaded zones affected by turbulence effects, is also evaluated. Conditional mean values of the strain rates upon the particle number concentration fields and the PDFs of aN and aT confirm that on the iso-surfaces of the particle fields the compressive and stretching effects are predominant. The aforementioned information is used to gain a deeper understanding of the influence of turbulence on premixed and non-premixed particle-forming flames, which will help us to develop transferable models for the simulation of nanoparticle synthesis.

A DNS evaluation of three MMC-like mixing models for transported PDF modelling of turbulent nonpremixed flames

Transported probability density function (TPDF) methods are suitable for modelling turbulent reactive flows. One of the main challenges is to accurately model the molecular mixing terms. In TPDF mixing models, it is desired that the principle of localness is satisfied so that the molecular mixing is performed locally in both physical and composition spaces. The multiple mapping conditioning (MMC) mixing model can ensure mixing localness without violating other desired principles. The present study examines three MMC-like mixing models, including the original MMC (OMMC) mixing model, shadow-position mixing model (SPMM) and a conceptually simplified multiple mapping conditioning (SMMC) mixing model. Three direct numerical simulation (DNS) datasets modelling turbulent nonpremixed ethylene flames with increasing levels of extinction are used for model evaluation. The DNS datasets are also used to provide both initial conditions and inputs needed over the course of TPDF runs to remove the uncertainties caused by turbulence closure, allowing the study to focus on the molecular mixing model. The mixing model coefficients are specified analytically by reference to a canonical mean scalar gradient (MSG) flow in order to achieve specifiable dissipation rate and user-controllable localness. The results show that the MMC-like mixing models yield similar prediction of flame extinction and reignition if the coefficients are properly specified. The MMC-like mixing models can also be tuned to achieve a desired level of localness. For conditional statistics, the MMC-like mixing models can yield correct level of conditional variances. By changing localness, the MMC-like models can yield solutions resembling the interaction by exchange with the mean (IEM) or Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) mixing model for extreme parameter choices. The models differ in their abilities to specify unconditional dissipation rates, at least in the flow considered, and in their ease of implementation.

Investigation of the temperature field of turbulent non-premixed flame for the variable angles of inclination of NexGen burner

In the airworthiness fireproof test of aviation components, the NexGen burner is an internationally recognized new burner, which may accurately control the flow of fuel and air. Owing to the buoyancy effect, the temperature fields of the NexGen burner under different angles of inclination have different degrees of thermal damage to the test pieces. The temperature fields of the turbulent non-premixed flame of NexGen burner with angles of inclination of 0°, 45° and 90° were studied by test and simulation. It is found that the inhomogeneity of the flame temperature field decreases gradually with the increasing of the angle of inclination of NexGen burner. The flame temperature field of NexGen burner with an angle of inclination of 90° is the most severe among that of the three working conditions. When the distance between the center point and the cross-section parallelling the outlet plane of the burner is 0.05–0.10 m, the buoyancy effect is not obvious with the change of the angle of inclination. After such distance being greater than 0.10 m, the influence of the buoyancy effect decreases gradually with the increasing of the angle of inclination of NexGen burner. The study provides a reference for aviation airworthiness fireproof schemes.

Numerical Simulation of Hydrogen-air Turbulent Diffusion Flame

The hydrogen-air turbulent diffusion flame - DLR H3 (benchmark test case at the International workshop on Measurement and computation of turbulent non-premixed flames, Naples, July 1996) [http://www.sandia.gov/TNF/1stWorkshop/TNF1.html], is numerically modeled using commercial CFD software CFD++. For simplicity, a 5 degree sector of the domain is considered. Good comparison is obtained for the non-dimensional quantities reported in the literature [Cheng T.-C., Fruechtel G., Neuber A., Lipp F., Hassel E. P. and Janicka J., 1995, "Experimental data base for numerical simulations of turbulent diffusion flames," Forschung im Ingenieurwesen, 61 (6), pp. 165-171].

Combustion Regimes in Turbulent Non-Premixed Flames for Space Propulsion

Direct numerical simulations of non-premixed fuel-rich methane–oxygen flames at 20 bar are conducted to investigate the turbulent mixing burning of gaseous propellants in rocket engines. The reacting flow is simulated by using an EBI-DNS solver within an OpenFOAM frame. The transport of species is resolved with finite-rate chemistry by using a complex skeletal mechanism that entails 21 species. Two different flames at low and high Reynolds numbers are considered to study the sensitivity of the flame dynamics to turbulence. Regime markers are used to measure the probability of the flow to burn in premixed and non-premixed conditions at different regions. The local heat release statistics are studied in order to understand the drivers in the development of the turbulent diffusion flame. Despite the eminent non-premixed configuration, a significant amount of combustion takes place in premixed conditions. Premixed combustion is viable in both lean and fuel-rich regions, relatively far from the stoichiometric line. It has been found that a growing turbulent kinetic energy is detrimental to combustion in fuel-rich premixed conditions. This is motivated by the disruption of the local premixed flame front, which promotes fuel transport into the diffusion flame. In addition, at downstream positions, higher turbulence enables the advection of methane into the lean core of the flame, enhancing the burning rates in these regions. Therefore, the primary effect of turbulence is to increase the fraction of propellants burnt in oxygen-rich and near-stoichiometric conditions. Consequently, the mixture fraction of the products shifts towards lean conditions, influencing combustion completion at downstream positions.

A pairwise mixing model with kernel constraint and its appraisal in transported PDF simulations of ethylene flames

Modeling micro-mixing remains a primary challenge for the transported probability density function (TPDF) method. In this study, the pairwise mixing with kernel constraint (KerM) model is proposed and evaluated in TPDF simulations of a turbulent non-premixed ethylene flame. The new model features controllable localness by selecting mixing particle pairs with a probability that depends on their distance in composition space, normalized by a characteristic kernel size. To evaluate the model in a controlled setting, TPDF simulations were carried out with the mean velocity, turbulent diffusivity and scalar mixing frequencies extracted from a direct numerical simulation (DNS) dataset. The predictions of the mean statistics and the conditional PDFs illustrate that the KerM model exhibits asymptotic behavior to the modified Curl (MC) and the Euclidean minimum spanning trees (EMST) model, respectively, depending on the kernel size. For the flame considered, results for KerM approach those for EMST when the kernel size is less than 0.01, while they approach those for MC when the kernel size is larger than 1.0. Given a kernel size of 0.1, KerM yields a notably better prediction of the overall combustion process than the conventional MC model. The predictions of the mean temperature and species mass fractions by KerM are similar to those by EMST, while KerM better predicts the conditional PDF of temperature than EMST that overdamps the conditional fluctuations. In addition, its complexity with the number of particles per cell is instead of O(Np2) for EMST. By incorporating different mixing timescales among species, the KerM-DD model better predicts the mean temperature field at the time instant close to local extinction than the KerM and EMST models. This work demonstrates that the KerM model, apart from being simple and robust in terms of implementation, features the advantages of being flexible in localness and being capable of incorporating differential diffusion.

Flamelet/transported PDF simulations of ethylene/air jet turbulent non-premixed flame using a three-equation PAH-based soot production model

This article reports flamelet/transported PDF (TPDF) simulations of the well-documented ethylene/air turbulent non-premixed jet flame investigated experimentally at Sandia. The transported PDF equation is solved with the Stochastic Eulerian Field method. The soot production is modelled by a validated three equation PAH-based soot model that predicts the mean soot aggregate properties at low computational time and includes a detailed description of the soot production processes. Gas and soot radiation is modelled using the rank-correlated full-spectrum k model. The turbulence/chemistry/soot production/radiation interactions are taken into account by means of the PDF method. Simulations are run by considering or not soot differential mixing. Based on recent conclusions drawn from Direct Numerical Simulations (Zhou et al., Proc. Combsut. Inst. 38 (2021) 2731–2739), soot differential mixing is modelled by neglecting soot mixing owing to sufficiently large mixing timescales. When soot differential mixing is considered, model predictions reproduce reasonably well the exhaustive set of experimental data, including flame structure, soot statistics and radiative outputs without adjusting parameters. In particular, the predictions demonstrate for the first time the capability of RANS/TPDF models to capture the soot intermittency. On the other hand, neglecting the soot differential mixing produces notable reductions in mean and fluctuating soot volume fraction and soot intermittency. Scatter plot analysis shows that the effects of soot differential mixing are more pronounced in regions of the mixture fraction space where soot surface growth and soot oxidation dominate the soot production, affecting these processes in a non-negligible manner. In an opposite way, soot nucleation and PAH condensation are much less significantly affected. Model results show also that disregarding soot differential mixing reduces the mean soot emission as well the soot emission turbulence/radiation interaction.

An experimental study and analysis of lift-off length in inclined nonpremixed turbulent jet flames

The lifted flame behavior of inclined turbulent jets, considering the relative angle between the fuel jet momentum and flame buoyancy was investigated experimentally by varying the inclination angle of nonpremixed fuel jets. Variations of lift-off length from the flame base to the nozzle exit was quantified experimentally with nozzles of various diameters (2, 3, and 5 mm) and inclination angles (range of −90° to 90°). The data was analyzed based on the experimental finding of upstream preheating effect depending on inclination angles. Major findings are as follows: (1) The lift-off length (h) increases linearly with the increase in initial fuel jet velocity (ue) at a fixed inclination angle. The proportionality slope κ of the linear relationship between h versus ue decreases appreciably with jet inclination angle for the negatively inclined flames; while for the positively inclined flames, the lift-off length decreases relatively weakly. (2) Physical analysis on the flow characteristics of inclined jets was conducted, and the preheating effect was proposed based on the combustion behaviors, especially for the negatively inclined jet flames. The preheating temperatures of unburned fuel/air mixtures at the flame base and nozzle exit were experimentally quantified, revealing that the negatively inclination angle can have a significant influence on the preheating temperatures. (3) Based on the proposed preheating mechanism, a physical model accounting for the effect of jet inclination angle was developed to quantify the lift-off length of inclined jet flames. The proposed model successfully represented lift-off lengths at all the experimental conditions with various inclination angles and nozzle diameters. The present findings provide new data set and a reasonable physical model for lifted flame behavior of inclined turbulent jet flames, revealing the effect of the relative angle between fuel jet momentum and flame buoyancy.