Abstracts Chemistry

Application of Tabulated Chemistry to Laminar Co-flow Diffusion Flames at Atmospheric and Elevated Pressures

by Eligh Nicholas Corchis-Scott

Numerical simulations of combustion can be very computationally expensive, particularly when combustion of the complex fuels frequently found in aircraft gas turbine engines is considered. The large chemical mechanisms required to simulate flames involving these fuels become computationally prohibitive when realistic combustion conditions are used. In order to render these simulations tractable, this thesis investigates chemistry tabulation techniques, which have the potential to significantly reduce the computational costs of simulating reacting flows. In this thesis, four different tabulation techniques will be assessed by applying the methods to the prediction of steady, laminar, co-flowflames. The tabulation techniques considered are the flame prolongation of intrinsic low dimensional manifold (FPI) method, the steady laminar flamelet method (SLFM), the flamelet/progress variable (FPV) method, and the radiative flame prolongation of intrinsic low dimensional manifold (RFPI) method. These techniques are all applied to ethylene flames at atmospheric pressure, methane flames at 5 atm and 10 atm, and Jet A surrogate flames at atmospheric pressure. The results are compared to those obtained for the same case obtained using detailed chemistry, both with and without low-Mach preconditioning. This comparison facilitates the discussion of the relative merits of the tabulation techniques in relation to each other and to detailed chemistry.