• Energy Research

In this work, reaction-diffusion manifold (REDIM) reduced chemistry is used in the simulation of turbulent non-premixed flames based on a transported-probability density function model. Differential molecular diffusion is applied in the generation of the manifolds. This is the first work to consider the gradients of the reduced variables as additional parameters in the REDIM model, and one-directional gradients are utilized to generate the REDIM reduced chemistry. Hereby, the influence of turbulence on differential molecular diffusion is automatically considered in terms of reduced variable gradients, and the physical transport properties (e.g., diffusion coefficients) are used in a detailed way, without any additional modeling (e.g., unity-Lewis number assumption). Although the scalar gradients appear as multi-directional in a general turbulent reacting flow, previous direct numerical simulation analysis reveals that REDIMs generated from one-directional gradients can accurately describe the system featuring multi-directional gradients, if this one-directional gradient has a major effect on the chemistry. Here, it is proposed to obtain such gradients under the hypothesis that the flame structure is locally one-dimensional at each spatial position. In order to retrieve the gradients of the reduced variables for the interpolation of the thermo-kinetic states from the REDIM table, the sub-grid gradient is evaluated here from the particle fields. The well-known Sandia series of flames is selected to validate the proposed algorithm. The results show that the new algorithm can reproduce the thermo-kinetic quantities with high accuracy for all investigated flames.

AbstractIdentifying combustion regimes in terms of premixed and non-premixed characteristics is an important task for understanding combustion phenomena and the structure of flames. A quasi-DNS database of the compositionally inhomogeneous partially premixed Sydney/Sandia flame in configuration FJ-5GP-Lr75-57 is used to directly compare different types of flame regime markers from literature. In the simulation of the flame, detailed chemistry and diffusion models are utilized and no turbulence and combustion models are used as the flame front and flow are fully resolved near the nozzle. This allows evaluating the regime markers as a post-processing step without modeling assumptions and directly comparing regime markers based on gradient alignment, drift term analysis and gradient free regime identification. The goal is not to find the correct regime marker, which might be impossible due to the different set of assumptions of every marker and the generally vague definition of the partially premixed regime itself, but to compare their behavior when applied to a resolved turbulent flame with partially premixed characteristics.

Mixing under high pressure conditions plays a central role in several engineering applications, such as direct-injection engines and liquid rocket engines. Numerical flow simulations have become a complementary tool to study the mixing process under these conditions but require complex thermodynamic modeling as well as validation with accurate experimental data. For this reason, we use experiments of supercritical single-phase jet mixing from the literature, where the mixing is quantified by the mixture speed of sound, as a reference for our work. We here focus on the thermodynamic modeling of multi-component flows under high pressure conditions and the analytical calculation of the mixture speed of sound. Our thermodynamic model is based on cubic equations of state extended for multi-components. Using an extension of OpenFOAM, we perform large-eddy simulations of hexane and pentane injections and compare our results with the experimentally measured mixture speed of sound at specific positions. The simulation results show the same characteristic trends, indicating that the mixing effects are well reproduced in the simulations. Additionally, the effect of the sub-grid scale modeling is assessed by comparing results using different models (Smagorinsky, Vreman, and Wall-Adapting Local Eddy-viscosity). The comprehensive simulation data presented here, in combination with the experimental data, provide a benchmark for numerical simulations of jet mixing in high pressure conditions.