A Prognosis Technique for Turbulent Combustion
Funded by: German Research Foundation (DFG) and Fluent Inc.
Objective: Detailed turbulent flame calculations based on the FLUENT PDF combustion code
Method: A comparison of Delft III flame computations and measurements
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The right picture shows the Delft Burner in an experimental setup for species concentration measurements with the LDA method. The main fuel is natural gas and the oxidizer is air. The resulting non-premixed flame shows strong coupling effects between the turbulence and chemistry. It is, therefore, well appropriate to investigate the performance of numerical models. To stabilize the flame on the burner head, the burner generates 12 premixed pilot flames (left picture). The hot products ignite the main fuel and avoid a lift off of the diffusion flame. |
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A temperature contour plot of 3-dimensional PDF calculations with 25 species is given. The middle plane, a perpendicular plane in the region of the pilot flames and the hot region of the pilot flames are shown. The computational grid consists of 500 000 cells. The simulations were performed with the FLUENT code on 16 parallel nodes at the LINUX cluster of the Mathematics Department of the University of Wyoming. |
| Detailed simulations of the Delft III flame are computationally expensive so that 2-dimensional computations are required to simulate the whole domain of the flame. A basic problem of such calculations is the treatment of the influence of the pilot flames, which was shown to have a very significant effect on model results. To overcome this problem one has to combine 2-dimensional calculations of all the flame with 3-dimensional pilot flame calculations. We performed such 3-dimensional pilot flame calculations in order to explain the structure of this flow. |
