A discontinuous Galerkin finite element method code, JENRE, was used to perform highly resolved simulations of ramjet-mode combustion in the University of Virginia Supersonic Combustion Facility cavity flameholder at a flight enthalpy of Mach 5. Prior experiments measured a freestream turbulence intensity at the inflow to the cavity ranging from 10 - 15%. A synthetic turbulence inflow generator was implemented for the simulations in this work to reproduce the turbulence at the inflow to the cavity. Velocity perturbations and turbulence intensity generated by the turbulent inflow boundary condition are shown to match those values measured in the facility using particle induced velocimetry. Simulations were performed both with and without inflow turbulence to study the effect of turbulence on flame stability and structure. In both cases, a cavity-stabilized flame was achieved. The inflow turbulence promoted more robust combustion, causing the flame to propagate further from the cavity into the core flow, broadening the flame angle with respect to the axial flow direction. The flame angle captured in the simulation agrees with experimental results and theoretical prediction. The cavity's vortex shedding frequency was identified. Flame strain rate and pressure fluctuations in the cavity shear layer were also measured and found to vary periodically at a frequency equal to that of the vortex shedding. High flow strain rate in the cavity shear layer, driven by the vortex shedding process, is identified as a cause of flame stretching and low OH concentrations as the flame traverses the cavity ramp. The effect of spatial resolution on the simulations is discussed through a comparison of cases using second-order and third-order accurate discontinuous Galerkin finite elements.
The effect of swirl, premixedness and geometry has been investigated for hydrogen enriched premixed flame using Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with a Thickened Flame (TF) model. Swirl strength has been varied to study the effects of swirl on flame behavior in a laboratory-scale premixed combustor operated under atmospheric conditions. In addition, the levels of premixedness and geometry have also been changed to study the role of these quantities on flame behavior. The turbulent flow field and the chemistry are coupled through TF model. In the LES-TF approach, the flame front is resolved on the c…
We propose a model for assessing the unresolved wrinkling factor in LES of turbulent premixed combustion. It relies essentially on a power-law dependence of the wrinkling factor to the filter size and an original expression for the active corrugating strain rate. The latter is written as a product of an efficiency function which accounts for viscous effects and the kinematic constraint of Peters, by a recent expression for the turbulent strain intensity. Yields functional expressions for the fractal dimension and the inner cut-off length scale, the latter being (i) filter-size independent and …
Transported probability density function (PDF) methods are widely used to model turbulent flames characterized by strong turbulence-chemistry interactions. Numerical methods directly resolving the PDF are commonly used, such as the Lagrangian particle or the stochastic fields (SF) approach. However, especially for premixed combustion configurations, characterized by high reaction rates and thin reaction zones, a fine PDF resolution is required, both in physical and in composition space, leading to high numerical costs. An alternative approach to solve a PDF is the method of moments, which has …
A Thickened Flame (TF) modeling approach is combined with a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) methodology to model premixed combustion and the accuracy of these model predictions is evaluated by comparing with the piloted premixed stoichiometric methane-air flame data of Chen et al. [Combust. Flame 107 (1996) 233-244] at a Reynolds number Re = 24,000. In the TF model, the flame front is artificially thickened to resolve it on the computational LES grid and the reaction rates are specified using reduced chemistry. The response of the thickened flame to turbulence is taken care of by incorporating an …
A new premixed turbulent combustion model is proposed. It is based on one-dimensional (1D) filtering of density times progress variable and of the reaction source term of laminar premixed flame profiles using a filter kernel which reflects the variation of the slicing area of planar flame fronts as they move through multidimensional filter volumes. It is shown that these multidimensional effects qualitatively change the relation between the filtered reaction source term and the Favre-filtered reaction progress variable compared to 1D filtering, particularly at large filter widths. Analytical r…
In order to explore the influence of combustion-induced thermal expansion on turbulence, a new research method is introduced. The method consists in jointly applying Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition and conditioned structure functions to analyzing turbulent velocity fields. Opportunities offered by the method are demonstrated by using it to process Direct Numerical Simulation data obtained earlier from two statistically 1D, planar, fully-developed, weakly turbulent, single-step-chemistry, premixed flames characterized by two significantly different (7.52 and 2.50) density ratios, with all other t…
HiPrFlame-An ab initio based real-fluid modeling approach for high-pressure combustion-I. Rationale, methodology, and application to laminar premixed flames
The present article reports experimental observation and analyses of a supercritical bifurcation of combustion instabilities triggered by the air inlet temperature (Ta). The studies are performed with a pressurised kerosene fuelled Lean Premixed Prevaporized (LPP) combustor operated under elevated temperature. Unlike some previous studies, starting from an unstable condition of the system, the amplitude of combustion instabilities suddenly decrease when Ta exceeds a critical value of Ta =570 K. When the temperature is lowered back the system returns to being unstable without featuring any hyst…
We investigate and model pressure effects on the turbulent burning velocity over a wide range of pressures and turbulence intensities with the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of statistically planar turbulent premixed flames for lean hydrogen/air mixture. DNS results indicate that the stretch factor has an impact on the turbulent burning velocity and flame surface area at elevated pressures. In particular, the enhanced stretch factor at high pressures increases the ratio of turbulent and laminar burning velocities, diminishing the "bending" effect. Based on a good consistency between turbule…
This paper presents an experimental analysis of flame-induced enstrophy transport in premixed swirl combustion at Karlovitz numbers between 20-50. Such flames posses a large-scale pressure field that -- in addition to the pressure fields associated with small-scale turbulent vortices -- can interact with density gradients to produce baroclinic torque. Simultaneous tomographic particle image velocimetry and formaldehyde planar laser induced fluorescence measurements are used to obtain high-resolution velocity and progress-variable fields. This allows statistical evaluation of the various terms …
The Lagrangian point of view is adopted to study turbulent premixed combustion. The evolution of the volume fraction of combustion products is established by the Reynolds transport theorem. It emerges that the burned-mass fraction is led by the turbulent particle motion, by the flame front velocity, and by the mean curvature of the flame front. A physical requirement connecting particle turbulent dispersion and flame front velocity is obtained from equating the expansion rates of the flame front progression and of the unburned particles spread. The resulting description compares favorably with…
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…
This paper provides an improved flamelet/progress variable (FPV) model for the simulation of turbulent combustion, employing the statistically most likely distribution (SMLD) approach for the joint probability density function (PDF) of the mixture fraction, Z, and of the progress parameter, Λ . Steady-state FPV models are built presuming the func- tional shape of the joint PDF of Z and Λ in order to evaluate Favre-averages of thermody- namic quantities. The mixture fraction is widely assumed to behave as a passive scalar with a mono-modal behaviour modelled by a \b{eta} -distribution. Moreover…
A new compact active turbulence generator is developed, tested, and characterized, which extends the capabilities of such generators used in turbulent premixed combustion research. The generator is composed of two blades that resemble the shape of two bow-ties. Hot-wire anemometry and high-speed imaging are performed to characterize the non-reacting flow produced by the generator and the blades dynamics, respectively. Two mean bulk flow velocities of 5.0 and 7.0 m/s are examined. For comparison purposes, in addition to the developed generator, tests are also performed for a free jet as well as…
Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH（于利希研究中心于利希超级计算中心）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Models for finite-rate-chemistry in underresolved flows still pose one of the main challenges for predictive simulations of complex configurations. The problem gets even more challenging if turbulence is involved. This work advances the recently developed PIESRGAN modeling approach to turbulent premixed combustion. For that, the physical information processed by the network and considered in the loss function are adjusted, the training process is smoothed, and especially effects from density changes are considered. The resulting model provides good results for a priori and a posteriori tests o…
Hot surface ignition and subsequent flame propagation of premixed n-hexane air mixtures are shown in this fluid dynamics video. High speed schlieren photography revealed 3 distinct behaviors of ignition and propagation as a function of mixture composition and initial pressure.
This paper extends the methodology to use physics-informed enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial networks (PIESRGANs) for LES subfilter modeling in turbulent flows with finite-rate chemistry and shows a successful application to a non-premixed temporal jet case. This is an important topic considering the need for more efficient and carbon-neutral energy devices to fight the climate change. Multiple a priori and a posteriori results are presented and discussed. As part of this, the impact of the underlying mesh on the prediction quality is emphasized, and a multi-mesh approach is dev…
Mixing, ignition and combustion behavior in a rapid compression and expansion machine operated under Premixed Charge Compression Ignition (PCCI) relevant conditions are investigated by combined passive optical and laser-optical high-speed diagnostics. The PCCI concept is realized using a split injection schedule consisting of a long base load injection and two closely separated short injections near top dead center. Previous studies of close-coupled double injections under constant ambient conditions showed an increased penetration rate of the subsequent fuel spray. However, the aerodynamic ga…
This paper experimentally analyzes the simultaneous influence of heat release and coherent vortex structures on the transfer of kinetic energy across scales around the laminar flame thickness $δ^0_\mathrm{L}$ in a turbulent premixed swirl flame and a non-reacting swirl flow. High-resolution tomographic particle image velocimetry and formaldehyde planar laser induced fluorescence measurements are used to obtain 3D velocity fields and estimates of the progress variable and density fields. The kinetic energy transfer across a filter scale of $Δ= 1.5 δ^0_\mathrm{L}$ was then quantified using physi…
Premixed flames propagating within small channels show complex combustion phenomena that differ from flame propagation at conventional scales. Available experimental and numerical studies have documented stationary/non-stationary and/or asymmetric modes that depend on properties of the incoming reactant flow as well as channel geometry and wall temperatures. The present work seeks to illuminate mechanisms leading to symmetry-breaking and limit cycle behavior that are fundamental to these combustion modes. Specifically, four cases of lean premixed methane/air combustion -- two equivalence ratio…
Analysis of near wall flame and wall heat flux modeling in turbulent premixed combustion
UM-SJTU Joint Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学密西根学院）；State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization, Zhejiang University（浙江大学清洁能源利用国家重点实验室）
As lean premixed combustion systems are more susceptible to combustion instabilities than non-premixed systems, there is an increasing demand for improved numerical design tools that can predict the occurrence of combustion instabilities with high accuracy. The inherent non-linearities in combustion instabilities can be of crucial importance, and we here propose an approach in which the one-dimensional Navier-Stokes and scalar transport equations are solved for geometries of variable cross-section. The focus is on attached flames, and for this purpose a new phenomenological model for the unste…
Nearly homogeneous and isotropic, highly turbulent flow, generated by an original multi-scale injector is experimentally studied. This multi-scale injector is made of three perforated plates shifted in space such that the diameter of their holes and their blockage ratio increase with the downstream distance. The Multi-Scale Turbulence Injector (hereafter, MuSTI) is compared with a Mono-Scale Turbulence Injector (MoSTI), the latter being constituted by only the last plate of MuSTI. This comparison is done for both cold and reactive flows. For the cold flow, it is shown that, in comparison with …
Flamelet Progress Variable (FPV) combustion models allow the evaluation of all thermo chemical quantities in a reacting flow by computing only the mixture fraction Z and a progress variable C. When using such a method to predict a turbulent combustion in conjunction with a turbulence model, a probability density function (PDF) is required to evaluate statistical averages (e.g., Favre average) of chemical quantities. The choice of the PDF is a compromise between computational costs and accuracy level. The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of the PDF choice and its modeling aspec…
There have been many experimental investigations into the ability of electric fields to enhance combustion by acting upon ion species present in flames [1]. In this work, we examine this phenomenon using a one-dimensional model of a lean premixed flame under the influence of a longitudinal electric field. We expand upon prior two-step chain-branching reaction laminar models with reactions to model the creation and consumption of both a positively-charged radical species and free electrons. Also included are the electromotive force in the conservation equation for ion species and the electrosta…
This paper describes the numerical simulation of the NASA Langley Research Center supersonic H2 -Air combustion chamber performed using two approaches to model the presumed probability density function (PDF) in the flamelet progress variable (FPV) framework. The first one is a standard FPV model, built presuming the functional shape of the PDFs of the mixture fraction, Z, and of the progress parameter, Λ. In order to enhance the prediction capabilities of such a model in high-speed reacting flows, a second approach is proposed employing the statistically most likely distribution (SMLD) techcni…
Diffusive transport of mass occurs at small scales in turbulent premixed flames. As a result, multicomponent mass diffusion, which is often neglected in direct numerical simulations (DNS) of premixed combustion, has the potential to impact both turbulence and flame characteristics at small scales. In this study, we evaluate these impacts by examining enstrophy dynamics and the internal structure of the flame for lean premixed hydrogen-air combustion, neglecting secondary Soret and Dufour effects. We performed three-dimensional DNS of these flames by implementing the Stefan-Maxwell equations in…
Combustion stabilization and enhancement of the flammability limits are mandatory objectives to improve nowadays combustion chambers. At this purpose, the use of an electric field in the flame region provides a solution which is, at the same time, easy to implement and effective to modify the flame structure. The present work describes an efficient flamelet progress-variable approach developed to model the fluid dynamics of flames immersed in an electric field. The main feature of this model is that it can use complex ionization mechanisms without increasing the computational cost of the simul…
A purely data-driven approach using deep convolutional neural networks is discussed in the context of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of turbulent premixed flames. The assessment of the method is conducted a priori using direct numerical simulation data. The network has been trained to perform deconvolution on the filtered density and the filtered density- progress variable product, and by doing so obtain estimates of the un-filtered progress variable field. Any non-linear function of the progress variable can then be approximated on the LES coarse mesh and explicitly filtered to advance the LES s…
Axisymmetric simulations of a liquid rocket engine are performed using a delayed detached-eddy-simulation (DDES) turbulence model with the Compressible Flamelet Progress Variable (CFPV) combustion model. Three different pressure instability domains are simulated: completely unstable, semi-stable, and fully stable. The different instability domains are found by varying the combustion chamber and oxidizer post length. Laminar flamelet solutions with a detailed chemical mechanism are examined. The $β$ Probability Density Function (PDF) for the mixture fraction and Dirac $δ$ PDF for both the press…
A modified Thickened Flame (TF) model based on Large Eddy Simulation methodology is used to investigate premixed combustion and the model predictions are evaluated by comparing with the piloted premixed stoichiometric methane-air flame data (Chen et al., 1996) for Reynolds numbers Re = 24,000 (flame F3) and Re=52,000 (flame F1). The basic idea of Thickened-Flame approach is that the flame front is artificially thickened to resolve on the computational LES grid while keeping the laminar flame speed ( ) constant. The artificially thickening of the flame front is obtained by enhancing the molecul…
Large eddy simulation of propane/air jet flame in the wrinkled flamelets regime of the Borghi diagram is used to assess the performance of a recently developed consumption speed correction model in premixed combustion. The combustion is modelled using flamelet tabulation with a presumed probability density function. The investigated flame does not lie in the shear layer and is subjected to self-driven oscillations, which is ideal to test the model performance. The flame behaviour is first discussed using an accurate simulation performed on a refined mesh requiring no correction. The same model…
Nonpremixed turbulent reacting flows are intrinsically difficult to model due to the strong coupling between turbulent motions and reaction. The large amount of heat released by a typical hydrocarbon flame leads to significant modifications of the thermodynamic variables and the molecular transport coefficients and thus alters the fluid dynamics. Additionally, in nonpremixed combustion, the flame has a complex spatial structure. Localized expansions and contractions occur, enhancing the dilatational motions. Therefore, the compressibility of the flow and the heat release are intimately related…
Direct Numerical Simulation data obtained earlier from two statistically 1D, planar, fully-developed, weakly turbulent, single-step-chemistry, premixed flames characterized by two significantly different (7.53 and 2.50) density ratios σ are analyzed to explore the influence of combustion-induced thermal expansion on the turbulence and the backward influence of such flow perturbations on the reaction-zone surface. For this purpose, the simulated velocity fields are decomposed into solenoidal and potential velocity subfields. The approach is justified by the fact that results obtained adopting (…
A space-filling, low blockage fractal grid is used as a novel turbulence generator in a premixed turbulent combustion experiment. In contrast to the power law decay of a standard turbulence grid, the downstream turbulence intensity of the fractal grid increases until it reaches a peak at some distance from the grid before it finally decays. The effective mesh size and the solidity are the same as those of a standard square mesh grid with which it is compared. It is found that, for the same flow rate and stoichiometry, the fractal generated turbulence enhances the burning rate and causes the fl…
Premixed flames exhibit different asymptotic regimes of interaction between heat release and turbulence depending on their respective length scales. At high Karlovitz number, the dilatation caused by heat release does not have any relevant effect on turbulent kinetic energy with respect to non-reacting flow, while at low Karlovitz number, the mean shear is a sink of turbulent kinetic energy, and counter-gradient transport is observed. This latter phenomenon is not well captured by closure models commonly used in Large Eddy Simulations that are based on gradient diffusion. The massive amount of…
Three-dimensional laminar flow structures with mixing, chemical reaction, normal strain, and shear strain qualitatively representative of turbulent combustion at the small scales are analyzed. A mixing layer is subjected to counterflow in the transverse y- and z-directions. Both non-reactive and reactive flows are examined. Reduction of the three-dimensional boundary-layer equations to a one-dimensional similar form is obtained allowing for heat and mass diffusion with variations in density and properties. In steady configurations, a set of ODEs governs the three velocity components as well as…
In turbulent premixed flames, the fractal dimension of flame iso-surface is argued to be $\mathbb{D}=7/3$ for Damköhler's large-scale limit $(Da>>1)$ and $\mathbb{D}=8/3$ for Damköhler's small-scale limit $(Da\sim\mathcal{O}(1))$ based on heuristic scaling arguments. However, such scaling arguments do not consider the effect of the multifractal nature of turbulent kinetic energy dissipation on the flame surface. In this paper, we account for the effects of multifractal dissipation on the fractal dimension of low $Da$ turbulent premixed flames. We derive two corrections to the upper-limit of fr…
Implementing multicomponent diffusion models in numerical combustion studies is computationally expensive; to reduce cost, numerical simulations commonly use mixture-averaged diffusion treatments or simpler models. However, the accuracy and appropriateness of mixture-averaged diffusion has not been verified for three-dimensional, turbulent, premixed flames. In this study we evaluated the role of multicomponent mass diffusion in premixed, three-dimensional high Karlovitz-number hydrogen, n-heptane, and toluene flames, representing a range of fuel Lewis numbers. We also studied a premixed, unsta…
The accurate prediction of small scales in underresolved flows is still one of the main challenges in predictive simulations of complex configurations. Over the last few years, data-driven modeling has become popular in many fields as large, often extensively labeled datasets are now available and training of large neural networks has become possible on graphics processing units (GPUs) that speed up the learning process tremendously. In fact, the successful application of deep neural networks in fluid dynamics, such as for underresolved reactive flows, is still challenging. This work advances …
A new computational methodology, termed "PeleLM-FDF" is developed and utilized for high fidelity large eddy simulation (LES) of complex turbulent combustion systems. This methodology is constructed via a hybrid scheme combining the Eulerian PeleLM base flow solver with the Lagrangian Monte Carlo simulator of the filtered density function (FDF) for the subgrid scale reactive scalars. The resulting methodology is capable of simulating some of the most intricate physics of complex turbulence-combustion interactions. This is demonstrated by LES of a non-premixed CO/H$_2$ temporally evolving jet fl…
This numerical study investigates the combustion modes in the second stage of a sequential combustor at atmospheric and high pressure. The sequential burner (SB) features a mixing section with fuel injection into a hot vitiated crossflow. Depending on the dominant combustion mode, a recirculation zone assists flame anchoring in the combustion chamber. The flame is located sufficiently downstream of the injector resulting in partially premixed conditions. First, combustion regime maps are obtained from 0-D and 1-D simulations showing the co-existence of three combustion modes: autoignition, fla…
In practical combustion systems, the high nonlinearity of the turbulent combustion process can result in unexpected behavior even for nominal operating conditions. This includes flame flashback in premixed gas turbines, engine unstart in scramjets, and failure of engines to ignite at high altitudes. Many of these events have catastrophic consequences. Hence, understanding the nature of such irregular excursions of combustion systems is important to ensure robust operation. The focus of this work is to identify the sources of such rare excursions from a dynamical systems perspective. Specifical…
