Coupling tabulated chemistry with Large Eddy Simulation of turbulent reactive flows

A new modeling strategy is developed to introduce tabulated chemistry methods in the LES of turbulent premixed combustion. The objective is to recover the correct laminar flame propagation speed of the filtered flame front when the subgrid scale turbulence vanishes. The filtered flame structure is mapped by 1D filtered laminar premixed flames. Closure of the filtered progress variable and the energy balance equations are carefully addressed. The methodology is applied to 1D and 2D filtered laminar flames. These computations show the capability of the model to recover the laminar flame speed and the correct chemical structure when the flame wrinkling is completely resolved. The model is then extended to turbulent combustion regimes by introducing subgrid scale wrinkling effects on the flame front propagation. Finally, the LES of a 3D turbulent premixed flame is performed. To cite this article: R. Vicquelin et al., C. R. Mecanique 337 (2009).     

Turbulent combustion modeling using a flamelet generated manifold approach——a validation study in Open FOAM

An Open FOAM based turbulence combustion solver with flamelet generated manifolds(FGMs) is presented in this paper. A series of flamelets, representative for turbulent flames, are calculated first by a one-dimensional(1D) detailed chemistry solver with the consideration of both transport and stretch/curvature contributions. The flame structure is then parameterized as a function of multiple reaction control variables. A manifold, which collects the 1D flame properties, is built from the 1D flame solutions.The control variables of the mixture fraction and the progress variable are solved from the corresponding transport equations. During the calculation, the scalar variables, e.g.,temperature and species concentration, are retrieved from the manifolds by interpolation.A transport equation for NO is solved to improve its prediction accuracy. To verify the ability to deal with the enthalpy loss effect, the temperature retrieved directly from the manifolds is compared with the temperature solved from a transport equation of absolute enthalpy. The resulting FGM-computational fluid dynamics(CFD) coupled code has three significant features, i.e., accurate NO prediction, the ability to treat the heat loss effect and the adoption at the turbulence level, and high quality prediction within practical industrial configurations. The proposed method is validated against the Sandia flame D,and good agreement with the experimental data is obtained.     

Evaluations of SGS Combustion,Scalar Flux and Stress Models in a Turbulent Jet Premixed Flame

A newly developed fractal dynamic SGS (FDSGS) combustion model and a scale self-recognition mixed (SSRM) SGS stress model are evaluated along with other SGS combustion, scalar flux and stress models in a priori and a posteriori manners using DNS data of a hydrogen-air turbulent plane jet premixed flame. A posteriori tests reveal that the LES using the FDSGS combustion model can predict the combustion field well in terms of mean temperature distributions and peak positions in the transverse distributions of filtered reaction progress variable fluctuations. A priori and a posteriori tests of the scalar flux models show that a model proposed by Clark et al. accurately predicts the counter-gradient transport as well as the gradient diffusion, and introduction of the model of Clark et al. into the LES yields slightly better predictions of the filtered progress variable fluctuations than that of a gradient diffusion model. Evaluations of the stress models reveal that the LES with the SSRM model predicts the velocity fluctuations well compared to that with the Smagorinsky model.     

Optimizing progress variable definition in flamelet-based dimension reduction in combustion

An automated method to optimize the definition of the progress variables in the flamelet-based dimension reduction is proposed. The performance of these optimized progress variables in coupling the flamelets and flow solver is presented. In the proposed method, the progress variables are defined according to the first two principal components (PCs) from the principal component analysis (PCA) or kernel-density-weighted PCA (KEDPCA) of a set of flamelets. These flamelets can then be mapped to these new progress variables instead of the mixture fraction/conventional progress variables. Thus, a new chemistry look-up table is constructed. A priori validation of these optimized progress variables and the new chemistry table is implemented in a CH₄/N₂/air lift-off flame. The reconstruction of the lift-off flame shows that the optimized progress variables perform better than the conventional ones, especially in the high temperature area. The coefficient determinations (R2 statistics) show that the KEDPCA performs slightly better than the PCA except for some minor species. The main advantage of the KEDPCA is that it is less sensitive to the database. Meanwhile, the criteria for the optimization are proposed and discussed. The constraint that the progress variables should monotonically evolve from fresh gas to burnt gas is analyzed in detail.     

Effects of Lewis Number on Scalar Variance Transport in Premixed Flames

The influences of differential diffusion rates of heat and mass on the transport of the variances of Favre fluctuations of reaction progress variable and non-dimensional temperature have been studied using three-dimensional simplified chemistry based Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data of statistically planar turbulent premixed flames with global Lewis number ranging from Le?= 0.34 to 1.2. The Lewis number effects on the statistical behaviours of the various terms of the transport equations of variances of Favre fluctuations of reaction progress variable and non-dimensional temperature have been analysed in the context of Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations. It has been found that the turbulent fluxes of the progress variable and temperature variances exhibit counter-gradient transport for the flames with Lewis number significantly smaller than unity whereas the extent of this counter-gradient transport is found to decrease with increasing Lewis number. The Lewis number is also shown to have significant influences on the magnitudes of the chemical reaction and scalar dissipation rate contributions to the scalar variance transport. The modelling of the unclosed terms in the scalar variance equations for the non-unity Lewis number flames have been discussed in detail. The performances of the existing models for the unclosed terms are assessed based on a-priori analysis of DNS data. Based on the present analysis, new models for the unclosed terms of the active scalar variance transport equations are proposed, whenever necessary, which are shown to satisfactorily capture the behaviours of unclosed terms for all the flames considered in this study.     

RANS Simulations of a Series of Turbulent V-Shaped Flames using Conditional Source-term Estimation

In the present study, Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations are applied to a series of turbulent V-shaped flames. Two formulations of Conditional Source-term Estimation (CSE) are developed using singly and doubly conditioned averages for turbulent premixed and partially premixed flames, respectively. Detailed chemistry is included. Conditionally averaged chemical source terms are closed by conditional averaged scalars which are obtained by inverting an integral equation. The objectives are to study a turbulent premixed V-shaped flame using the premixed CSE approach and apply the Doubly Conditional CSE (DCSE) combustion model to a case of stratified combustion. The partially premixed implementation involves double conditioning on two variables, mixture fraction and progress variable. The present study represents the first application of DCSE for a series of turbulent stratified flames. First, CSE is analysed for fully premixed conditions. A sensitivity analysis on the number of CSE ensembles and different scalar dissipation model closures is performed. Good results are obtained in terms of velocity and progress variable profiles. Finally, the partially premixed formulation is applied to the stratified case at three different conditions, corresponding to two different turbulence grids and three different profiles of the equivalence ratio, providing promising results.     

Heat Transfer Modeling in the Context of Large Eddy Simulation of Premixed Combustion with Tabulated Chemistry

Tabulated chemistry models like the Flamelet Generated Manifolds method are a good approach to include detailed information on the reaction kinetics in a turbulent flame at reasonable computational costs. However, so far, not all information on e.g. heat losses are contained in these models. As those often appear in typical technical applications with enclosed flames in combustion chambers, extensions to the standard FGM approach will be presented in this paper, allowing for the representation of non-adiabatic boundaries. The enthalpy as additional control variable for the table access is introduced, such that the chemistry database becomes three-dimensional with mixture fraction, reaction progress variable and enthalpy describing the thermo-chemical state. The model presented here is first validated with a two-dimensional enclosed Bunsen flame and then applied within the Large Eddy Simulations of a turbulent premixed swirl flame with a water-cooled bluff body and a turbulent stratified flame, where additional modeling for the flame structure using artificially thickened flames was included. The results are encouraging, as the temperature decrease towards the bluff body in the swirl flame and the cooling of the pilot flame exhaust gases in the stratified configuration can be observed in both experiments and simulation.     

Hybrid Transported-Tabulated Strategy to Downsize Detailed Chemistry for Numerical Simulation of Premixed Flames

A strategy to introduce hydrocarbon combustion detailed chemistry into three-dimensional numerical simulation of flames is reported. Significant progress has been made recently in terms of accuracy and robustness in both chemical kinetics and flow computations. However, the highest resolution reached in simulation of practical burner does not yet ensure that the response of intermediate radical species is fully captured. In the method discussed, the full set of species and elementary reaction rates of the detailed mechanism are retained, but only species featuring non-zero concentration in fresh and burnt gases are transported with the flow. Intermediate chemical species, developing within thin flame layers, are expressed resorting to their self-similar properties observed in a series of canonical combustion problems, projected into an optimized progress variable defined from all transported species. The method is tested with success in various adiabatic and non-adiabatic laminar steady- and unsteady-strained premixed flames.     

Combustion Modeling Including Heat Loss Using Flamelet Generated Manifolds: A Validation Study in OpenFOAM

In numerical combustion applications the Flamelet Generated Manifolds technique (FGM) is being used at an increasingly number of occasions. This technique is an approach to reduce the chemistry efficiently and accurately. In the present work FGM is coupled to an OpenFOAM-based CFD solver. The multidimensional flame is described by an ensemble of 1D laminar flames generated through a 1D detailed chemistry solver, by taking into account both convective and diffusive contributions as well as the required source terms. The flame structure is parameterized as function of a progress variable and few controlling variables such as the variance of the progress variable and the enthalpy. A manifold, which collects the 1D flame properties, is built from the 1D flame solutions. For the progress variable and each controlling variable, a transport equation is added to the standard flow conservation equations. During runtime, key quantities are retrieved from the manifold by interpolation. The resulting FGM-CFD coupled code has two significant features: the ability to treat heat loss effects and the adoption of turbulence level to describe the flame structure, providing high quality numerical results within practical industrial configurations. In the present work, a backward-facing step configuration with a methane/air mixture is investigated. Some key aspects of reactive phenomena in standard industrial burner configurations, such as the recirculation region development and the flame stabilization, are considered here. Numerical simulations are performed comparing results with experiments available in literature (Banhawy et al. Combust. Flame 50:153–165, 18). Both RANS and LES approaches are adopted: improvements with respect to prior available works are highlighted. Moreover, LES data, available for the first time within this configuration, are used to provide a deeper insight of turbulence/combustion interaction.     

Study of a Filtered Flamelet Formulation for Large Eddy Simulation of Premixed Turbulent Flames

Despite significant advances in the understanding and modelling of turbulent combustion, no general model has been proposed for simulating flames in industrial combustion devices. Recently, the increase in computational possibilities has raised the hope of directly solving the large turbulent scales using large eddy simulation (LES) and capturing the important time-dependant phenomena. However, the chemical reactions involved in combustion occur at very small scales and the modelling of turbulent combustion processes is still required within the LES framework. In the present paper, a recently presented model for the LES of turbulent premixed flames is presented, analysed and discussed. The flamelet hypothesis is used to derive a filtered source term for the filtered progress variable equation. The model ensures proper flame propagation. The effect of subgrid scale (SGS) turbulence on the flame is modelled through the flame-wrinkling factor. The present modelling of the source term is successfully tested against filtered direct numerical simulation (DNS) data of a V-shape flame. Further, a premixed turbulent flame, stabilised behind an expansion, is simulated. The predictions agree well with the available experimental data, showing the capabilities of the model for performing accurate simulations of unsteady premixed flames.     

Inclusion of Preferential Diffusion in Simulations of Premixed Combustion of Hydrogen/Methane Mixtures with Flamelet Generated Manifolds

In this paper we study the possibility to account for preferential diffusion effects in lean turbulent premixed flames in numerical predictions with reduced chemistry. We studied the situation when hydrogen is added to methane at levels of 20% and 40% by volume in the fuel, at lean combustion (??=?0.7) with air. The base case of pure methane was used as a reference. In this case preferential diffusion effects are negligible. First the sensitivity of the mass burning rate to flame stretch was investigated, in one dimensional computations with detailed chemistry, to set reference values. Then the framework of the Flamelet Generated Manifolds (FGM) was used to construct an adequate chemical method to take preferential diffusion into account, without the need for using detailed chemistry. To that end a generalization of the method was presented in which five controlling variables are required. For this system, proper transport equations and effective Lewis numbers where derived. In practice not all five variables are necessary to include and as a first step we limited the amount in the numerical tests in this study to two controlling variables. The method was then tested in configurations in which there was an interaction of coherent vortices and turbulence with flames. It was demonstrated that a minimum of two controlling variables is needed to account for the changed mass burning rate as function of stretch and curvature. It was shown that one-dimensional FGM as well as one-step Arrhenius kinetics can not describe this relation.     

Numerical Simulation of Non-premixed Turbulent Combustion Using the Eddy Dissipation Concept and Comparing with the Steady Laminar Flamelet Model

Numerical simulations of the Sandia flame CHNa and the Sydney bluff-body stabilized flame HM1E are reported and the results are compared to available experimental data. The numerical method is based on compressible URANS formulations which were implemented recently in the OpenFOAM toolbox. In this study, the calculations are carried out using the conventional compressible URANS approach and a standard k- ?? turbulence model. The Eddy Dissipation Concept with a detailed chemistry approach is used for the turbulence-chemistry interaction. The syngas (CO/H₂) chemistry diluted by 30 % nitrogen in the Sandia flame CHNa and CH₄/H₂ combustion in the Sydney flame HM1E are described by the full GRI-3.0 mechanism. A robust implicit Runge-Kutta method (RADAU5) is used for integrating stiff ordinary differential equations to calculate the reaction rates. The radiation is treated by the P1-approximation model. Both target flames are predicted with the Steady Laminar Flamelet model using the commercial code ANSYS FLUENT as well. In general, there is good agreement between present simulations and measurements for both flames, which indicates that the proposed numerical method is suitable for this type of combustion, provides acceptable accuracy and is ready for further combustion application development.     

Modelling of Spray Flames with Doubly Conditional Moment Closure

Simulations of a pilot-stabilised flame in a uniformly dispersed ethanol spray are performed using a Doubly Conditional Moment Closure (DCMC) model. The DCMC equation for spray combustion is derived, using the mixture fraction and the reaction progress variable as conditioning variables, including droplet evaporation and differential diffusion terms. A set of closure sub-models is suggested to allow for a first, preliminary application of the DCMC model to the test case presented here. In particular, the DCMC model is used to provide complete closure for the Favre-averaged spray terms in the mean and variance equations of the conditioning variables and the present test case is used to assess the importance of each term. Comparison with experimental data shows a promising overall agreement, whilst differences are related to modelling choices.     

Differential Diffusion Modelling in LES with RCCE-Reduced Chemistry

The present work shows results obtained from the incorporation of a soot model into a combined Large Eddy Simulation and Conditional Moment Closure approach to modelling turbulent non-premixed flames. Soot formation is determined via the solution of two transport equations for soot mass fraction and particle number density, where acetylene is employed as the incipient species responsible for soot nucleation. The concentrations of the gaseous species are calculated using a Rate-Controlled Constrain Equilibrium approach to reduce the number of species to solve from a detailed gas-phase kinetic scheme involving 63 species. The study focuses on the influence of differential diffusion of soot particles on soot volume fraction predictions. The results of calculations are compared with experimental data for atmospheric methane flames, Overall, the study demonstrates that the model, when used in conjunction with a representation of differential diffusion effects, is capable of predicting soot formation at a fundamental level in the turbulent non- premixed flames considered.     

Large Eddy Simulation of Turbulent Premixed Swirling Flames Using Dynamic Thickened Flame with Tabulated Detailed Chemistry

A sub-grid scale (SGS) combustion model by combining dynamic thickened flame (DTF) with flamelet generated manifolds (FGM) tabulation approach (i.e. DTF-FGM) is developed for investigating turbulent premixed combustion. In contrast to the thickened flame model, the dynamic thickening factor of the DTF model is determined from the flame sensor, which is obtained from the normalized gradient of the reaction progress variable from the one-dimensional freely propagating premixed flame simulations. Therewith the DTF model can ensure that the thickening of the flame is limited to the regions where it is numerically necessary. To describe the thermo-chemistry states, large eddy simulation (LES) transport equations for two characteristic scalars (the mixture fraction and the reaction progress variable) and relevant sub-grid variances in the DTF-FGM model are presented. As to the evaluation of different SGS combustion models, another model by utilizing the combination of presumed probability density function (PPDF) and FGM (i.e. PPDF-FGM) is also described. LES of two cases with or without swirl in premixed regime of the Cambridge swirl burner flames are performed to evaluate the developed SGS combustion model. The predicted results are compared with the experimental data in terms of the influence of different LES grids, model sensitivities to the thickening factor, the wrinkling factor, and the PPDF of characteristic scalars, the evaluation of different modelling approaches for the sub-grid variances of characteristic scalars, and the predictive capability of different SGS combustion models. It is shown that the LES results with the DTF-FGM model are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data, and better than the results with the PPDF-FGM approach due to its ability to predict better in regions where flame is not resolved.     

Subgrid Scale Modeling in Large-Eddy Simulation of Turbulent Combustion Using Premixed Flamelet Chemistry

Large-eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent combustion with premixed flamelets is investigated in this paper. The approach solves the filtered Navier–Stokes equations supplemented with two transport equations, one for the mixture fraction and another for a progress variable. The LES premixed flamelet approach is tested for two flows: a premixed preheated Bunsen flame and a partially premixed diffusion flame (Sandia Flame D). In the first case, we compare the LES with a direct numerical simulation (DNS). Four non-trivial models for the chemical source term are considered for the Bunsen flame: the standard presumed beta-pdf model, and three new propositions (simpler than the beta-pdf model): the filtered flamelet model, the shift-filter model and the shift-inversion model. A priori and a posteriori tests are performed for these subgrid reaction models. In the present preheated Bunsen flame, the filtered flamelet model gives the best results in a priori tests. The LES tests for the Bunsen flame are limited to a case in which the filter width is only slightly larger than the flame thickness. According to the a posteriori tests the three models (beta-pdf, filtered flamelet and shift-inversion) show more or less the same results as the trivial model, in which subgrid reaction effects are ignored, while the shift-filter model leads to worse results. Since LES needs to resolve the large turbulent eddies, the LES filter width is bounded by a maximum. For the present Bunsen flame this means that the filter width should be of the order of the flame thickness or smaller. In this regime, the effects of subgrid reaction and subgrid flame wrinkling turn out to be quite modest. The LES-results of the second case (Sandia Flame D) are compared to experimental data. Satisfactory agreement is obtained for the main species. Comparison is made between different eddy-viscosity models for the subgrid turbulence, and the Smagorinsky eddy-viscosity is found to give worse results than eddy-viscosities that are not dominated by the mean shear. Paper presented on the Eccomas Thematic Conference Computational Combustion 2007, submitted for a special issue of Flow, Turbulence and Combustion.     

Modeling of Turbulent Natural Gas and Biogas Flames of the Delft Jet-in-Hot-Coflow Burner: Effects of Coflow Temperature,Fuel Temperature and Fuel Composition on the Flame Lift-Off Height

The structure of a turbulent non-premixed flame of a biogas fuel in a hot and diluted coflow mimicking moderate and intense low dilution (MILD) combustion is studied numerically. Biogas fuel is obtained by dilution of Dutch natural gas (DNG) with CO₂. The results of biogas combustion are compared with those of DNG combustion in the Delft Jet-in-Hot-Coflow (DJHC) burner. New experimental measurements of lift-off height and of velocity and temperature statistics have been made to provide a database for evaluating the capability of numerical methods in predicting the flame structure. Compared to the lift-off height of the DNG flame, addition of 30 % carbon dioxide to the fuel increases the lift-off height by less than 15 %. Numerical simulations are conducted by solving the RANS equations using Reynolds stress model (RSM) as turbulence model in combination with EDC (Eddy Dissipation Concept) and transported probability density function (PDF) as turbulence-chemistry interaction models. The DRM19 reduced mechanism is used as chemical kinetics with the EDC model. A tabulated chemistry model based on the Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) is adopted in the PDF method. The table describes a non-adiabatic three stream mixing problem between fuel, coflow and ambient air based on igniting counterflow diffusion flamelets. The results show that the EDC/DRM19 and PDF/FGM models predict the experimentally observed decreasing trend of lift-off height with increase of the coflow temperature. Although more detailed chemistry is used with EDC, the temperature fluctuations at the coflow inlet (approximately 100K) cannot be included resulting in a significant overprediction of the flame temperature. Only the PDF modeling results with temperature fluctuations predict the correct mean temperature profiles of the biogas case and compare well with the experimental temperature distributions.     

Large Eddy Simulation of Stratified and Sheared Flames of a Premixed Turbulent Stratified Flame Burner Using a Flamelet Model with Heat Loss

This paper presents large eddy simulations (LES) of the Darmstadt turbulent stratified flame burner (TSF) at different operating conditions including detailed heat loss modeling. The target cases are a non-reacting and two reacting cases. Both reacting cases are characterized by stratification, while one flame additionally features shear. In the regime diagram for premixed combustion, the studied flames are found at the border separating the thin reaction zones regime and the broken reaction zones regime. A coupled level set/progress variable model is utilized to describe the combustion process. To account for heat loss, an enthalpy defect approach is adopted and reformulated to include differential diffusion effects. A novel power-law rescaling methodology is proposed to integrate the enthalpy defect approach into the level set/progress variable model which is extensively validated in two validation scenarios. It is demonstrated that the LES with the newly developed model captures the influence of heat loss well and that the incorporation of heat loss effects improves the predictions of the TSF-burner over adiabatic simulations, while reproducing the experimentally observed flame lift-off from the pilot nozzle.     

Chemical kinetics modeling and LES combustion model effects on a perfectly premixed burner

Chemical kinetics modeling and coupling with turbulent combustion models for compressible Large Eddy Simulations (LES) is a critical issue. Accurate flow predictions can only be guaranteed if the coupling is well mastered. In a first attempt to qualify the effect of each model, the case of a lean premixed swirled combustor with comprehensive measures is targeted (species mass fractions and temperature fields). For the investigation, two turbulent combustion models are considered. The first model relies on a presumed PDF approach coupled to a look-up chemistry table obtained with a reduced chemical scheme. The second model makes use of the thickened flame approach using the same reduced chemical scheme but with reaction rates computed explicitly as the computation advances. Then, to estimate kinetic schemes reduction effects, the first model is compared to a third one, with the same PDF approach, but coupled to a look-up chemistry table obtained with a complete chemical scheme. All LES are very close to each other. The main difference between the different predictions relies on CO mass fractions. Although they are all able to return good outlet mass fractions, CO values inside the flame are different depending on the model used. To cite this article: G. Albouze et al., C. R. Mecanique 337 (2009).