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.     

Large Eddy Simulation of a Polydisperse Ethanol Spray Flame

Ethanol is identified as an interesting alternative fuel. In this regards, the predictive capability of combustion Large Eddy Simulation approach coupled to Lagrangian droplet dynamic model to retrieve the turbulent droplet dispersion, droplet size distribution, spray evolution and combustion properties is investigated in this paper for an ethanol spray flame. Following the Eulerian-Lagrangian approach with a fully two way coupling, the Favre-filtered low Mach number Navier-Stokes equations are solved on structured grids with dynamic sub-grid scale models to describe the turbulent carrier gas phase. Droplets are injected in polydisperse manner and generated in time dependent boundary conditions. They evaporate to form an air-fuel mixture that yields spray flame. Part of the ethanol droplets evaporates within the prevaporization area before reaching the combustion zone, making the flame to burn in a partially premixed regime. The chemistry is described by a tabulated detailed chemistry based on the flamelet generated manifold approach. The fuel, ethanol, is modeled by a detailed reaction mechanism consisting of 56 species and 351 reversible reactions. The simulation results including excess gas temperature, droplet velocities and corresponding fluctuations, droplet mean diameters and spray volume flux at different distances from the exit plane show good agreement with experimental data. Analysis of combustion spray features allows gaining a deep insight into the two-phase flow process ongoing.     

Large Eddy Simulation of a Bluff Body Stabilised Premixed Flame Using Flamelets

Large Eddy Simulations of an unconfined turbulent lean premixed flame, which is stabilised behind a bluff body, are conducted using unstrained flamelets as the sub-grid scale combustion closure. The statistics from the simulations are compared with the corresponding data obtained from the experiment and it is demonstrated that the experimental observations are well captured. The relative positioning of the shear layers and the flame brush are analysed to understand the radial variations of the turbulent kinetic energy at various streamwise locations. These results are also compared to confined bluff body stabilised flames, to shed light on the relative role of incoming and shear driven turbulence on the behaviour of the flame brush and the turbulent kinetic energy variation across it.     

Large Eddy Simulation of a Propagating Turbulent Premixed Flame

A large eddy simulation of a turbulent premixed flame propagatingthrough a chamber containing a square obstruction is presented anddiscussed. The governing equations for compressible, reacting flowsare Favre filtered and turbulence closure is achieved using thedynamic Smagorinsky subgrid model. A simple flame surface densitymodel based on the flamelet concept is employed for the subgrid scalereaction rate. The simulation gives very good agreement with experimentalresults for the speed and the shape of the flame as it propagates throughthe chamber. The peak pressures, however, are underpredicted by20–30%. Reasons for this are discussed and it is concluded that amore sophisticated combustion model is required for complex flowssuch as this one, if a more accurate prediction of the pressureis to be achieved.     

A 5-D Implementation of FGM for the Large Eddy Simulation of a Stratified Swirled Flame with Heat Loss in a Gas Turbine Combustor

Numerical simulations are foreseen to provide a tremendous increase in gas-turbine burners efficiency in the near future. Modern developments in numerical schemes, turbulence models and the consistent increase of computing power allow Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to be applied to real cold flow industrial applications. However, the detailed simulation of the gas-turbine combustion process remains still prohibited because of its enormous computational cost. Several numerical models have been developed in order to reduce the costs of flame simulations for engineering applications. In this paper, the Flamelet-Generated Manifold (FGM) chemistry reduction technique is implemented and progressively extended for the inclusion of all the combustion features that are typically observed in stationary gas-turbine combustion. These consist of stratification effects, heat loss and turbulence. Three control variables are included for the chemistry representation: the reaction evolution is described by the reaction progress variable, the heat loss is described by the enthalpy and the stratification effect is expressed by the mixture fraction. The interaction between chemistry and turbulence is considered through a presumed beta-shaped probability density function (PDF) approach, which is considered for progress variable and mixture fraction, finally attaining a 5-D manifold. The application of FGM in combination with heat loss, fuel stratification and turbulence has never been studied in literature. To this aim, a highly turbulent and swirling flame in a gas turbine combustor is computed by means of the present 5-D FGM implementation coupled to an LES turbulence model, and the results are compared with experimental data. In general, the model gives a rather good agreement with experimental data. It is shown that the inclusion of heat loss strongly enhances the temperature predictions in the whole burner and leads to greatly improved NO predictions. The use of FGM as a combustion model shows that combustion features at gas turbine conditions can be satisfactorily reproduced with a reasonable computational effort. The implemented combustion model retains most of the physical accuracy of a detailed simulation while drastically reducing its computational time, paving the way for new developments of alternative fuel usage in a cleaner and more efficient combustion.     

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.     

Assessment of the Dynamic SGS Wrinkling Combustion Modeling Using the Thickened Flame Approach Coupled with FGM Tabulated Detailed Chemistry

The dynamic power-law wrinkling model proposed by Charlette et al. is coupled with Flamelet Generated Manifolds (FGM) tabulated chemistry combined with an artificially thickened flame model (ATF) for large eddy simulation. The dynamic formulation is similar to the “Germano” procedure and uses Taylor series based Gaussian filter. Thereby, the power-law wrinkling model parameter is considered to have both temporal and spatial dependency. Series of simulations are conducted for a lean premixed turbulent flame, using both dynamic and non-dynamic versions of the wrinkling model under different grid levels. The simulation results applying the non-dynamic wrinkling model show different behavior for each particular flame resolution, where none of the simulations could deliver the correct flame statistics, such as flame height. The dynamic version of the power-law wrinkling model improves the results independently of the flame resolution, as a consequence of the conservation of the total flame surface.     

Large Eddy Simulation of Turbulent Reacting Shear Layers Including Finite-Rate Chemistry and Detailed Diffusion Processes

Large eddy simulations (LES) of turbulent temporal shear layers with hydrogen chemistry are performed. In these simulations, approximate deconvolution is applied as an implicit subgrid-scale modeling approach to a reacting flow in combination with a steady flamelet model for the filtered heat release term. No additional heuristical or physical subgrid models are used. The formulation of the flamelet equations in physical space does not only allow to consider a detailed reaction scheme and the extinguished phase but also to take into account detailed diffusion mechanisms (Soret and Dufour effects, multicomponent diffusion coefficients). Two different levels of diffusion approximations are investigated in this work, the aim of which is twofold: Firstly, to verify approximate deconvolution as a tool for convective transport of mass, momentum and energy in gas flow, by comparing the LES results with those of a direct numerical simulation and secondly, to investigate the influence of detailed diffusion on the laminar flamelets and the LES results.     

Large Eddy Simulation of the Sensitivity of Vortex Breakdown and Flame Stabilisation to Axial Forcing

The effect of axial forcing on the flame/vortex breakdown interaction is studied, with particular focus on the Precessing Vortex Core (PVC). Large Eddy Simulation (LES), together with a filtered flamelet model describing the subgrid combustion, is performed to study a lean premixed flame undergoing mass flow fluctuations in a wide range of frequencies and amplitude. In average, forcing at frequencies lower than the PVC characteristic frequency moves the recirculation zone upstream the combustor in the premixing tube, while higher frequencies do not relevantly affect the flow/flame. With the help of Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) a detailed analysis of the dynamics of the central recirculation zone (CRZ) is performed showing how the excitation at lower frequencies weakens the PVC and allows the flame to propagate upstream. Extended POD is also applied to illustrate the flow/flame interactions during the excitation cycle.     

Investigation of Two-Fluid Methods for Large Eddy Simulation of Spray Combustion in Gas Turbines

An extension of the large eddy simulation (LES) technique to two-phase reacting flows, required to capture and predict the behavior of industrial burners, is presented. While most efforts reported in the literature to construct LES solvers for two-phase flow focus on Euler–Lagrange formulation, the present work explores a different solution (‘two-fluid’ approach) where an Eulerian formulation is used for the liquid phase and coupled with the LES solver of the gas phase. The equations used for each phase and the coupling terms are presented before describing validation in two simple cases which gather some of the specificities of real combustion chamber: (1) a one-dimensional laminar JP10/air flame and (2) a non-reacting swirled flow where solid particles disperse (Sommerfeld and Qiu, Int. J. Multiphase Flow 19(6):1093–1127, 1993). After these validations, the LES tool is applied to a realistic aircraft combustion chamber to study both a steady flame regime and an ignition sequence by a spark. Results bring new insights into the physics of these complex flames and demonstrate the capabilities of two-fluid LES.     

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.     

Large Eddy Simulation of a Turbulent Lifted Flame using Conditional Moment Closure and Rate-Controlled Constrained Equilibrium

The objective of this paper is the simulation of a turbulent flame by employing the Rate-Controlled Constrained Equilibrium (RCCE) approach for the chemistry reduction, and Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) coupled with Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) for the turbulence-chemistry interaction modelling. RCCE is a systematic method for mechanism reduction, based on the concept that certain species characterized by faster time scales are in a constrained equilibrium state, determined by the concentration of the species controlled by the chemical kinetics. A general system of differential equations can be derived, independent on the selection of the fast and slow species (which appears as a parameter). The RCCE system is used to compute the conditional source term in the CMC equation. The flame simulated here is a methane flame issuing into a vitiated co-flow formed by hot combustion products, the ??Cabra?? flame, which is controlled by auto-ignition and is therefore sensitive to the chemical mechanism. The results show an influence of the chosen chemistry in the ignition length.     

Conditional Moment Closure/Large Eddy Simulation of the Delft-III Natural Gas Non-premixed Jet Flame

Large-Eddy Simulation (LES), coupled with the Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) sub-grid model and the GRI3 detailed chemical mechanism, are used to explore the structure of the Delft III piloted turbulent non-premixed flame. The use of a quite refined multi-dimensional CMC grid and the detailed chemistry, together with the capability of LES to follow local fluctuations of the scalar dissipation, allow the prediction of localised extinctions and re-ignitions in locations consistent with experiment. The statistics of velocity, mixture fraction, temperature, mass fractions of the major species and of OH are overall in good agreement with experimental data. Carbon monoxide is captured very well, but NO is overpredicted, perhaps due to inherent limitations of the GRI3 scheme to capture NO emissions.     

后台阶流动再附着过程的大涡模拟研究

应用自主开发的大涡模拟程序数值模拟研究了后台阶流动中再附着过程的演变。在流动几何参数不变情况下，给出了再附长度随雷诺数的变化规律，并与实验进行了比较，二者相符得比较好。在此基础上，给出了三种典型雷诺数下，后台阶流动的回流区特征。在湍流情况下，研究了突扩比对再附长度的影响，与实验结果吻合的比较好。详细讨论了湍流情况下大涡拟序结构的瞬时再附着过程。 这些研究结果对具有再附着现象的流动结构的工程应用具有指导意义。     

Large Eddy Simulation of Premixed Turbulent Flames Using the Probability Density Function Approach

In the present study a Large Eddy Simulation and Filtered Density Function model is applied to three premixed piloted turbulent methane flames at different Reynolds Numbers using the Eulerian stochastic fields approach. The model is able to reproduce the flame structure and flow characteristics with a low number of fields (between 4 and 16 fields). The results show a good agreement with experimental data with the same closures employed in non-premixed combustion without any adjustment for combustion regime. The effect of heat release on the flow field is captured correctly. A wide range of sensitivity studies is carried out, including the number of fields, the chemical mechanism, differential diffusion effects and micro-mixing closures. The present work shows that premixed combustion (at least in the conditions under study) can be modelled using LES-PDF methods.. Finally, the ability of the model to predict flame quenching is studied. The model can accurate capture the conditions at which combustion is not sustainable and large pockets of extinction appear.     

Large Eddy Simulation of Wind Turbine Wakes

We present the coupling of a vortex particle-mesh method with immersed lifting lines for the Large Eddy Simulation of wind turbine wakes. The method relies on the Lagrangian discretization of the Navier–Stokes equations in vorticity-velocity formulation. Advection is handled by the particles while the mesh allows the evaluation of the differential operators and the use of fast Poisson solvers. We use a Fourier-based fast Poisson solver which simultaneously allows unbounded directions and inlet/outlet boundaries. The method also allows the feeding of a turbulent incoming flow. We apply this methodology to the study of large scale aerodynamics and wake behavior of tandem wind turbines. We analyze the generators performance, unsteady power, loads and aerodynamics they are subjected to. The average flow field of the wakes is also computed and turbulence statistics are extracted. In particular, we investigate the influence of the type of turbulent inflow used—precomputed or synthetic—, and study wake meandering.     

速度估计模型在大涡模拟中的应用

介绍了速度估计模型的基本思想及其在物理空间的实现。速度估计模型依靠湍流大尺度的非线性作用估计出小尺度,从而可直接求解亚格子应力项而不需要额外的模型。本文采用该模型对不同雷诺数下的各向同性衰减湍流进行了模拟,并与直接数值模拟、理论分析和其他亚格子模型的大涡模拟结果进行了比较。也初步考察了网格分辨率、不同精度的紧致格式对大涡模拟结果的影响。     

Large Eddy Simulation of an Internal Combustion Engine Using an Efficient Immersed Boundary Technique

This paper presents highly resolved large eddy simulations (LES) of an internal combustion engine (ICE) using an immersed boundary method (IBM), which can describe moving and stationary boundaries in a simple and efficient manner. In this novel approach, the motion of the valves and the piston is modeled by Lagrangian particles, whilst the stationary parts of the engine are described by a computationally efficient IBM. The proposed mesh-free technique of boundary representation is simple for parallelization and suitable for high performance computing (HPC). To demonstrate the method, LES results are presented for the flow and the combustion in an internal combustion engine. The Favre-filtered Navier-Stokes equations are solved for a compressible flow employing a finite volume method on Cartesian grids. Non-reflecting boundary conditions are applied at the intake and the exhaust ports. Combustion is described using a flame surface density (FSD) model with an algebraic reaction rate closure. A simplified engine with a fixed axisymmetric valve (see Appendix A) is employed to show the correctness of the method while avoiding the uncertainties which may be induced by the complex engine geometry. Three test-cases using a real engine geometry are investigated on different grids to evaluate the impact of the cell size and the filter width. The simulation results are compared against the experimental data. A good overall agreement was found between the measurements and the simulation data. The presented method has particular advantages in the efficient generation of the grid, high resolution and low numerical dissipation throughout the domain and an excellent suitability for massively parallel simulations.