Numerical simulations and modeling of turbulent combustion

CERFACS/CFD, 42 Av. G. Coriolis, 31057 Toulouse Cedex, France

Abstract

Turbulent combustion is the basic physical phenomenon responsible for efficient energy release by any internal combustion engine. However it is accompanied by other undesirable phenomena such as noise, pollutant species emission or damaging instabilities that may even lead to the system desctruction. It is then crucial to control this phenomenon, to understand all its mecanisms and to master it in industrial systems. For long time turbulent combustion has been explored only through theory and experiment. But the rapid increase of computers power during the last years has allowed an important development of numerical simulation, that has become today an essential tool for research and technical design. Direct numerical simulation has then allowed to rapidly progress in the knowledge of turbulent flame structures, leading to new modelisations for steady averaged simulations. Recently large eddy simulation has made a new step forward by refining the description of complex and unsteady flames. The main problem that arises when performing numerical simulation of turbulent combustion is linked to the description of the flame front. Being very thin, it can not however be reduced to a simple interface as it is the location of intense chemical transformation and of strong variations of thermodynamical quantities. Capturing the internal structure of a zone with a thickness of the order of 0.1 mm in a computation with a mesh step 10 times larger being impossible, it is necessary to model the turbulent flame. Models depend on the chemical structure of the flame, on the ambiant turbulence, on the combustion regime (flamelets, distributed combustion, etc.) and on the reactants injection mode (premixed or not). One finds then a large class of models, from the most simple algebraic model with a one-step chemical kinetics, to the most complex model involving probablity density functions, cross-correlations and multiple-step or fully complex chemical kinetics.