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The study of fuel chemistry and soot inception in non-premixed combustion can be advanced by characterizing flame configurations in which the advection and diffusion transport can be finely controlled, with the ability to decouple pyrolysis from oxidation. Also, the ideal flames to be investigated should be perturbed minimally by probes and thick enough for sampling techniques to yield spatially resolved measurements of their structure. The Planar Mixing Layer Flame (PMLF) configuration introduced herein is established between a fuel and an oxidizer slot jet adjacent to each other and shielded from the ambient air by annularly co-flowing inert nitrogen. The PMLF flow is kept laminar and steady by an impinging flat plate equipped with a rectangular exhaust slit opening which anchors the position of the hot combustion products via buoyancy. The PMLF is accessible to sampling and its flow stability is preserved when using any tested probe. The experiments are complemented with 2DComputational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling with detailed chemical kinetics. The results demonstrate that the PMLF has a self-similar boundary layer structure whose horizontal cross-sections are equivalent to properly selected and equally thick 1D- Counterflow Flames (CFs). The equivalence allows for excellent predictions of the PMLF thermochemical structure characterized experimentally but at a small fraction of the 2D-CFD computational cost. The 1D-CF equivalence affects even aromatics less than twofold despite their kinetics being known to be very sensitive to the temperature field. Importantly, the PMLF thickness is several millimeters and grows at increasing HABs so that the equivalent 1D-CFs have strain rates as small as 7.0 /s which cannot be studied in CF experiments. As a result, the PMLF emerges as a promising canonical non-premixed flame configuration for studying flame chemistry and soot inception on time scales of tens of milliseconds typical of many combustion applications.
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Low-Mach-Number Simulation of Diffusion Flames with the Chemical-Diffusive Model
This work describes and tests the calibration process of the chemical-diffusive model (CDM) for the simulation of non-premixed diffusion flames. The CDM is an alternative, simplified approach for incorporating the effects of combustion in a fluid simulation, based on the ideas of regulating the rate of energy release such that the properties of combustion waves (e.g. flames and detonations) are reproduced. Past implementations of the CDM have considered single-stoichiometry fuel-air mixtures or mixtures with variable stoichiom- etry but with premixed modes of combustion. In this work, the CDM is tested and shown to work for non-premixed, low-Mach-number flames (i.e., diffusion flames) by incorporat- ing it into a numerical model which solves the reactive and compressible Navier-Stokes equations with the barely implicit correction (BIC) algorithm, which removes the acoustic limit on the integration time-step size. Simulations of one-dimensional premixed laminar flames reproduce the required premixed laminar flame speed, thickness, and temperature. A two-dimensional, steady-state, laminar coflow diffusion flame is computed, and the result demonstrates the ability of the algorithm to compute a non-premixed flame. Lastly, a two- dimensional simulation of two opposing jets of fuel and air show that the CDM approach can compute the structure of a counter-flow diffusion flame.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1839510
- PAR ID:
- 10104189
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2169
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2019-2169
