Reactive Rayleigh-Taylor systems are characterized by the competition between the growth of the instability and the rate of reaction between cold (heavy) and hot (light) phases. We present results from state-of-the-art numerical simulations performed at high resolution in 2d by means of a self-consistent lattice Boltzmann method which evolves the coupled momentum and thermal equations and includes a reactive term. We tune the parameters affecting flame properties, in order to address the competition between turbulent mixing and reaction, ranging from slow to fast-reaction rates. We also study the mutual feedback between turbulence evolution driven by the Rayleigh-Taylor instability and front propagation against gravitational acceleration. We quantify both the enhancement of flame propagation due to turbulent mixing for the case of slow reaction-rate as well as the slowing down of turbulence growth for the fast reaction case, when the flame quickly burns the gravitationally unstable phase. An increase of intermittency at small scales for temperature characterizes the case of fast reaction, associated to the formation of sharp wrinkled fronts separating pure hot/cold fluids regions.
Multidimensional numerical simulations of a homogeneous, chemically reactive gas were used to study ignition, flame stability, and deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT) in a supersonic combustor. The configuration studied was a rectangular channel with a supersonic inflow of stoichiometric ethylene-oxygen and a transimissive outflow boundary. The calculation is initialized with a velocity in the computational domain equal to that of the inflow, which is held constant for the duration of the calculation. The compressible reactive Navier-Stokes equations were solved by a high-order numeric…
Shock flame interactions are fundamental problems in many combustion applications ranging from flame acceleration to flame control in supersonic propulsion applications. The present paper seeks to quantify the rate of deformation of the flame surface and burning velocity caused by the interaction and to clarify the underlying mechanisms. The interaction of a single shock wave with a cellular flame in a Hele-Shaw shock tube configuration was studied experimentally, numerically, and theoretically. A mixture of stoichiometric hydrogen-air at sub-atmospheric pressure was chosen such that large cel…
The Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability develops and leads to turbulence when a heavy fluid falls under the action of gravity through a light one. We consider this phenomenon accompanied by a reactive transformation between the fluids, and study with Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) how the reaction (flame) affects the turbulent mixing in the Boussinesq approximation. We discuss "slow" reactions where the characteristic reaction time exceeds the temporal scale of the RT instability. In the early turbulent stage, effects of the flame are distributed over a maturing mixing zone, whose development…
The critical dimension necessary for a flame to propagate in suspensions of fuel particles in oxidizer is studied analytically and numerically. Two types of models are considered: First, a continuum model, wherein the individual particulate sources are not resolved and the heat release is assumed spatially uniform, is solved via conventional finite difference techniques. Second, a discrete source model, wherein the heat diffusion from individual sources is modeled via superposition of the Green's function of each source, is employed to examine the influence of the random, discrete nature of th…
Large eddy simulations with three-dimensional finite-volume Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) model are performed for a hydrogen / nitrogen lifted flame with detailed chemical meachanism. The emphasis is laid on the influences of mesh resolution and convection scheme of finite-volume CMC model on predictions of reactive scalar distribution and unsteady flame dynamics. The results show that the lift-off height is underestimated and the reactive scalars (e.g. temperature, H2 and OH) are over-predicted with coarser CMC mesh. It is also found that further refinement of the CMC mesh would not consid…
The early stages of flames propagation in tubes with no-slip walls and the inversion of the flame front from a convex shape directed towards unburned gas to a concave shape with a cusp directed to the burned gas, known as a tulip flame, was investigated for closed and half-open tubes by solving the fully compressible reactive Navier-Stokes equations with a one-step Arrhenius chemical model for the highly reactive hydrogen/air and slowly reacting methane/air mixtures. The development of the tulip flame in hydrogen/air obtained in simulations with a one-step Arrhenius model was compared with sim…
Thermal radiation of the hot combustion products usually does not influence noticeably the flame propagating through gaseous mixture. the situation is changed drastically in the presence even small concentration of particles, which absorb radiation, transfer the heat to the surrounding unburned gaseous mixture by means of heat conduction, so that the gas phase temperature in front of the advancing flame lags that of the particles. It is shown that radiative preheating of unreacted mixture ahead of the flame results in a modest increase of the advancing flame velocity for a highly reactive gase…
Detailed chemistry-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are computationally expensive due to the solution of the underlying chemical kinetics system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Here, we introduce a novel open-source library aiming at speeding up such reactive flow simulations using OpenFOAM, an open-source C++ software for CFD. First, our dynamic load balancing model DLBFoam (Tekgül et al., 2021) is utilized to mitigate the computational imbalance due to chemistry solution in multiprocessor reactive flow simulations. Then, the individual (cell-based) chemistry so…
The present work reports on the numerical investigation of NOx in three turbulent piloted diffusion flames of different levels of extinction. The study involves two-dimensional axisymmetric modeling of combustion in these flames with fairly detailed chemistry, i.e. GRI 3.0 mechanism. The main focus of the study is to analyze the effects of the two different combustion model approaches, such as infinitely fast chemistry based unsteady flamelet and finite rate chemistry based EDC, in predicting the NOx formation in three piloted methane jet flames (Sandia D, E, and F). The EDC approach is able t…
The Effect of Heat Loss During the Early Stages of Flame Propagation and Tulip Flame Formation
Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University(诺尔迪塔,皇家理工学院和斯德哥尔摩大学);Aviation Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on High Speed and High Reynolds Number, Shenyang Key Laboratory of Computational Fluid Dynamics, Aerodynamics Research Institute, AVIC Shenyang(航空高速与高雷诺数科学技术重点实验室,沈阳计算流体力学重点实验室,空气动力学研究所,中航沈飞)
In this contribution, velocity and its dissipation spectra in turbulent non-premixed jet flames are investigated by using two Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) databases of temporally evolving jets with different bulk jet Reynolds numbers. In the DNS differential diffusion and flame dynamics effects have been accounted for and the flames experience high levels of extinction followed by re-ignition. It turns out that the spectra extracted from different statistically homogeneous planes across the jets and selected times corresponding to various occurring flame regimes (extinction and re-ignitio…
We study the dynamics and properties of a turbulent flame, formed in the presence of subsonic, high-speed, homogeneous, isotropic Kolmogorov-type turbulence in an unconfined system. Direct numerical simulations are 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. The system being modeled represents turbulent combustion with the Damkohler number Da = 0.05 and with the turbulent velocity at the energy injection scale 30 times larger than the…
Data from a three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulation of a turbulent premixed Bunsen flame at a low global Lewis number are analyzed to address the effects of the curvature on the local flame front. For this purpose, the chemical kinetics is modeled according to a reduced scheme, involving 5 reactions and 7 species, to mimic a H$_{2}$/Air flame at equivalence ratio $ϕ=0.5$. An increase of the local temperature and reaction rate is found for fronts elongated into the fresh gases (concave), while local quenching is observed for fronts elongated in the opposite direction (convex), i.e. toward…
One of the most important and difficult parts of constructing a multidimensional numerical simulation of flame acceleration and deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT) in a reacting flow is finding a reliable and affordable model of the chemical and diffusive properties. For simulations of realistic scenarios, full detailed chemical models are computationally prohibitive. In addition, they are usually inaccurate for high-temperature and high-pressure shock-laden flows. This paper presents a general approach for developing an automated procedure to determine the reaction parameters for a si…
A three-dimensional, steady, laminar shear-layer flow spatially developing under a boundary-layer approximation with mixing, chemical reaction, and imposed normal strain is analyzed. The imposed strain creates a counterflow that stretches the vorticity in the spanwise direction. The equations are reduced to a two-dimensional form for three velocity components. The non-reactive and reactive cases of the two-dimensional form of the governing equations are solved numerically, with consideration of the several of parameter inputs such as Damköhler number, Prandtl number, chemical composition, and …
The theory of inertial manifolds (IM) is used to develop reduced-order models of turbulent combustion. In this approach, the dynamics of the system are tracked in a low-dimensional manifold determined in-situ without invoking laminar flame structures or statistical assumptions about the underlying turbulent flow. The primary concept in approximate IM (AIM) is that slow dominant dynamical behavior of the system is confined to a low-dimension manifold, and fast dynamics respond to the dynamics on the IM instantaneously. Decomposition of slow/fast dynamics and formulation of an AIM is accomplishe…
The detonation wave stability is addressed using Fickett's equation, i.e., the reactive form of Burgers' equation. This serves as a simple analogue to the reactive Euler equations, permitting one to gain insight into the nonlinear dynamics of detonation waves. Chemical kinetics were modeled using a two-step reaction with distinct induction and reaction zones. An evolution equation for the detonation structure was derived using the method of matched asymptotics for large activation energy and slow rate of energy release. While the first order solution was found unconditionally unstable, the sec…
The problem of shock induced ignition by a piston is addressed in the framework of Fickett's model for reactive compressible flows, i.e., the reactive form of Burgers' equation. An induction-reaction two-step chain-branching model is used to study the coupling between the energy release and the compressible hydrodynamics occurring during the shock ignition transient leading to a detonation. Owing to the model's simplicity, the ignition and acceleration mechanism is explained using the two families of characteristics admitted by the model. The energy release along the particle paths provides th…