Model reduction for reacting flow applications

A model reduction approach based on Galerkin projection, proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), and the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM) is developed for chemically reacting flow applications. Such applications are challenging for model reduction due to the strong coupling between fluid dynamics and chemical kinetics, a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, highly nonlinear chemical kinetics, and long simulation run-times. In our approach, the POD technique combined with Galerkin projection reduces the dimension of the state (unknown chemical concentrations over the spatial domain), while the DEIM approximates the nonlinear chemical source term. The combined method provides an efficient offline–online solution strategy that enables rapid solution of the reduced-order models. Application of the approach to an ignition model of a premixed H₂/O₂/Ar mixture with 19 reversible chemical reactions and 9 species leads to reduced-order models with state dimension several orders of magnitude smaller than the original system. For example, a reduced-order model with state dimension of 60 accurately approximates a full model with a dimension of 91,809. This accelerates the simulation of the chemical kinetics by more than two orders of magnitude. When combined with the full-order flow solver, this results in a reduction of the overall computational time by a factor of approximately 10. The reduced-order models are used to analyse the sensitivity of outputs of interest with respect to uncertain input parameters describing the reaction kinetics.