SANDIA Flame D
Application Challenge AC2-09 © copyright ERCOFTAC 2024
Overview of CFD Simulations
All the calculations presented below were obtained within the MOLECULES
FP5 project Contract N° G4RD-CT-2000-00402 by the team of the Institute
of Thermal Machinery, Częstochowa University of Technology. The
computations were performed with BOFFIN-LES code developed at Imperial
College by the group of Prof. W.P. Jones. BOFFIN-LES computer code
utilizes a boundary conforming general curvilinear coordinate system with
a co-located storage arrangement. It incorporates a fully implicit
formulation and is second order accurate in space and time. For the
convection terms an energy conserving discretization scheme is used and
matrix preconditioned conjugate gradient methods are used to solve the
equations for pressure and velocity etc. The CFD simulations are all LES
predictions with various subgrid scale models and turbulence/combustion
interaction approaches and neither RANS nor URANS methods are studied in
this document.
In the LES calculations two models of turbulence/combustion interaction
were applied: steady flamelet model and simplified Conditional Moment
Closure (CMC) neglecting the convection term in physical space (The CMC
module was developed by Prof. E. Mastorakos from Cambridge University).
In both cases the standard subgrid-scale (SGS) Smagorinsky model was
used. Then in order to evaluate the importance of the subgrid-scale
models the LES calculations were also performed using steady flamelet and
dynamic (Germano) SGS model.
Table CFD – A Summary description of all test cases
Name
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GNDPs
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PDPs (Problem Definition Parameters)
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SPs (Simulated Parameters)
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Re |
Fuel jet composition
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Pilot flame composition |
Detailed data
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DOAPs
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CFD1 (steady flamelet with subgrid-scale model)
CFD2 (CMC with subgrid-scale model)
CFD3 (CMC with dynamic Germano subgrid-scale model)
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22400
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25% of methane (CH4) and 75% of air
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C2H2, H2, air, CO2 and N2
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Axial profiles
Tmax , x/D (Tmax )
Lconst(η , YCH4 , YO2)
Lconst(YH2O , YCO2)
YH2, max , z/D (YH2, max )
YCO, max , z/D (YCO, max )
RMSmax
z/D (RMSmax )
Radial profiles
z/D = 15, 30, 45
Fmax , Umax
r½(η) , r½(U )
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Table CFD – B Summary description of all available data files and simulated parameters
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SP1
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SP2
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SP3
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SP4
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SP5
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(ms-1)
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Axial profiles
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Radial profiles
x/D = 15
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Radial profiles
x/D = 30
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Radial profiles
x/D = 45
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Axial profiles
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CFD1
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cfd11.dat
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cfd12.dat
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cfd13.dat
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cfd14.dat
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cfd15.dat
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CFD2
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cfd21.dat
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cfd22.dat
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cfd23.dat
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cfd24.dat
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cfd25.dat
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CFD3
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cfd31.dat
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cfd32.dat
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cfd33.dat
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cfd34.dat
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cfd35.dat
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SIMULATION CASE CFD1
Solution Strategy
In the CFD1 the steady flamelet concept was applied with the standard
Smagorinsky SGS model for turbulence.
Computational Domain
The CFD1 results were obtained with computational meshes 80×80×160
nodes. The computational domain at the inlet and outlet plane extended
to 5.5D and 18.3D respectively in both horizontal directions. The
length of the domain was equal to 50D. The mesh was stretched in axial
direction by exponential function and in radial directions by
hyperbolic tangent function. The grid refinement studies for the LES
calculations showed that the grid resolution with 80×80×160 nodes in
the proposed computational domain is sufficient and further grid
refinement leads to minor changes of the statistically converged
parameters. The computational domain is shown in Fig.4.
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Fig. 4. Computational domain for Sandia flame D (left); mesh resolution in the inlet plane (right)
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Boundary Conditions
The boundary conditions in the inlet plane were assumed to be as follows:
- the mean and RMS profiles of the axial velocity component were interpolated from experimental data - Fig.3 presents comparison of the experimental data with boundary profiles applied in computations; the random disturbances, introduced as a white noise, were scaled by RMS profile and next they were superimposed on the mean profile;
- the mean and RMS values of the radial velocity components were assumed equal to zero;
- the mixture fraction was assumed equal to 1.0 in the main jet; 0.27 in the pilot jet and zero in the co-flowing air.
At the lateral boundaries the axial velocity was assumed equal to the
velocity of coflowing air (0.9 m/s) while the remaining components were
equal to zero. At the outlet the convective type boundary conditions were
assumed which do not require specification of any variables.
Application of Physical Models
In the most general case modeling of the combustion processes is very
expensive computationally since together with the solution of the flow
field it requires solution of additional transport equations for
particular N species (e.g. CO, CO2, H2O, H2, etc.)
produced in chemical reactions.
The transport equations for species have the following form:
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where:
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is the density
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is the velocity component
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is the mass fraction of species
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is the reaction rate (speed of creation/destruction of a given species)
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is the diffusion coefficient usually taken the same (denoted by ) for each species and defined as , where is the molecular viscosity and is the Prandtl number.
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Reaction rate of a given species k is a sum of the reaction rates in all
M reactions in which species k occurs. It is defined as:
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where:
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is the reaction rate of species in reaction
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are the molar stochiometric coefficients after and before reaction respectively
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is the atomic weight of species
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is the rate of progress of reaction ; it is a function of temperature, density and species mass fraction and may be obtained from chemical kinetics or experiment; methods of determination of the rate of progress of reaction are beyond the scope of this report.
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With the assumption of low Mach number flow the equation of energy may be
expressed as the transport equation for the temperature which is given as
[1]:
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where:
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is the temperature
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is the heat diffusion coefficient
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is the specific heat
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is the heat release defined as a sum of product of reaction rates and formation enthalpies
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The equations given above together with the Navier-Stokes equations, the
equation of state and the continuity equation form a closed system which
allows computing the flow field together with combustion process.
However, their direct implementation in a computer code with regard for
tens of species and tens (or even several hundred) of chemical reactions
is still impossible from the point of view of capability of available
computers, and for this reason significant simplifications have to be
made.
The turbulence/combustion interaction steady flamelet concept implemented
in the BOFFIN code was introduced by Peters
[2],
which stated that the
flame can be seen as an ensemble of laminar flamelets. It used the
equation for the conserved scalar referred to as the mixture fraction.
The equation for the mixture fraction (denoted as ) has the simple form
of convection-diffusion equation and is given as:
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The mixture fraction is a normalized quantity
( ) and represents a
local fuel to oxidizer ratio ( means pure oxidizer,
means pure fuel ).
The assumption that one conserved scalar is sufficient to describe
thermochemical state of the flow decouples the modelling of reactive
phenomena from that of flow modelling. Assuming that particular species
and temperature are functions of the mixture fraction
the
equations and
may be transformed[1] into the mixture fraction
space resulting in:
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In the above transformations spatial derivatives parallel to the iso-surface
of mixture fraction have been neglected as they are small
compared to the gradients in normal direction. In Equations
and the
only quantity depending on the flow field is the scalar dissipation
rate reflecting the mixing process.
Equations and constitute
the unsteady flamelet approach in which the dependence of the temperature
and species on time is retained. Assuming the structure of the flamelet
to be steady, even though the mixture fraction itself depends on time,
the functional dependence of the thermodynamic variables on the mixture
fraction can be formulated in the form .
These relations can
be obtained from chemical equilibrium assumption or from laminar flamelet
calculations. The latter approach is applied in the BOFFIN code in which
the functional dependences
and also are provided from
the solution of the following system of equations:
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In the context of LES method of turbulence modelling, the mixture
fraction equation has the form:
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where bar and tilde represents the LES filtered and Favre-filtered
variables according to the general definition:
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The nonlinear interaction of the subgrid scales , in the diffusive
term of Eq. is usually neglected as small comparing to interaction of
the subgrid scales in the convective part represented by the term in
brackets on the right hand side of Eq. . In the BOFFIN code
this term is modelled using the gradient hypothesis given as:
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where stands for turbulent Prandtl number and is the turbulent
viscosity obtained from the subgrid model. Turbulent viscosity in the BOFFIN code
is computed either by the Smagorinsky subgrid model or its dynamic
modification introduced by Germano. In the former case is assumed to
be a constant defined by the user while in the latter its evaluation is lumped
into dynamic procedure. In turbulent flows and formulated previously in laminar conditions, depend on multiple
parameters (scalar dissipation rate, unresolved velocity and mixture
fraction, subgrid model) and therefore knowledge of the filtered mixture
fraction is insufficient.
In context of LES, the filtered density, species concentration and
temperature are computed using density-weighted probability function
defined as:
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where:
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expresses polynomial dependence on
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is the sample space of
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and filtered probability density function which is defined as:
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where the 'fine-grained' probability density function is given as:
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The symbol denotes deterministic value of the mixture fraction.
Using definition the filtered density, species concentration and
temperature are computed according to the following formulas:
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In the BOFFIN code the functional form of the density-weighted
probability function is chosen as a β-function, which is defined in the
interval [0,1] and which allows us to analytically integrate Eqs.(16-18).
The β-function is defined as:
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where:
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The mixture fraction subgrid variance is defined in the BOFFIN code based on
the gradient-type model as:
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where following Branley and Jones[3]
the model constant is assumed
to be equal to 0.1. The molecular viscosity in BOFFIN code is computed
using empirical formula[4] based on the species concentration and
temperature.
The results obtained for the flamelet models were obtained using GRI 3.0
mechanism with 9 species: CH4, CO, CO2, H2,
H2O, O2, N2, NO, OH.
For turbulence modelling the standard model was applied.
Numerical Accuracy
The BOFFIN code is second order accurate in space and time.
CFD Results
CFD1 – steady flamelet model with standard Smagorinsky SGS model for
turbulence; all data files are in the Tecplot format.
cfd11.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along the jet flame axis
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd12.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 15
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd13.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 30
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd14.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 45
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd15.dat – mean and fluctuating temperature, mixture fraction and mass fractions of chosen species along the jet flame axis
- ASCII file; 19 columns:
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Poinsot T. and Veynante D.: Theoretical and numerical combustion, Edwards, 2001
- ↑ Peters N.: "Laminar diffusion flamelet models in non-premixed turbulent combustion", Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, vol. 10, 1984
- ↑ Branley N., Jones W.P.: "Large eddy simulations of a turbulent non-premixed flame", Combustion and Flame, vol. 127, 2001
- ↑ 4. Perry R.H. and Green D.W.: Chemical Engineer's Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1993
SIMULATION CASE CFD2
Solution Strategy
In the CFD2 case the simplified Conditional Moment Closure approach was
applied. In this simplification the convective term in the physical
space was neglected and the model was equivalent to the unsteady
flamelet one. As a subgrid-scale model the standard Smagorinsky model
was used.
Computational Domain
The computational domain for CFD2 was the same as for CFD1.
Boundary Conditions
Boundary conditions are the same as for CFD1.
Application of Physical Models
For the CMC model the simplified Smooke mechanism was applied
considering 16 species: CH4, CO, CO2, H2, H2O,
O2, N2, NO, OH, CH3,
CH3O, CH2O, H2O2, H, HCO, O.
The CMC model independently proposed in the nineties by Bilger[1] and
Klimenko[2] consists of solution of the conditional species
concentration balance equations in the mixture fraction space. The
equation proposed by Bilger[1] and Klimenko[2] is shown below:
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In the present calculations the convective term with a conditional
velocity was neglected and the turbulence/combustion interaction is
equivalent to the unsteady flamelet model.
Coupling between the balance equation of conditional species
concentration corresponding to the chemical reaction and turbulent
flow field is limited to the information contained in the scalar
dissipation rate . In the CMC module conditional scalar
dissipation rate in the mixture fraction space is taken as the
analytical solution for steady strained one-dimensional non premixed
laminar flame[3]:
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The maximum value of scalar dissipation rate is computed from the
presumed pdf (β-function), which requires the information about the
large scale mixture fraction (resolved scale from the LES code) and
its SGS variance:
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The combustion model based on conditional average species concentration
requires the following quantities from the turbulent flow field
computed using LES:
- instantaneous values of mixture fraction
- SGS mixture fraction variance
- SGS scalar dissipation rate
In the RANS models the scalar variance is computed from its transport
equation, while in LES the SGS mixture fraction is computed assuming
the gradient-type approximation:
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In order to close the CMC model the SGS dissipation rate must be
estimated. The SGS scalar dissipation rate in BOFFIN is computed
following dimensional arguments:
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In order to solve the CMC equation in mixture fraction space the mass
fractions for all chemical species must be computed in physical space,
using the presumed pdf (β-function):
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Similarly, the following relation is valid for the mean temperature:
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Using the concentration of species at the new iteration step the
density can be evaluated. The species concentrations at the new
iteration step are transmitted later on to the BOFFIN code.
Solving the CMC equation in each LES cell would be prohibitively
expensive. However, variation of scalar dissipation rate in space is
much lower than variation of the velocity field, it was decided to
solve the CMC equations only for the 16 subdomains shown in Fig. 5.
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Fig. 5. Domain decomposition for parallel computations - simplified domain
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Numerical Accuracy
The BOFFIN code is second order accurate in space and time.
CFD Results
CFD2 – CMC model with standard Smagorinsky SGS model for turbulence;
all data files are in the Tecplot format.
cfd21.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along the jet flame axis
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd22.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 15
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd23.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 30
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd24.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 45
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd25.dat – mean and fluctuating temperature, mixture fraction and mass fractions of chosen species along the jet flame axis
- ASCII file; 19 columns:
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Bilger R.W.: "Conditional Moment Closure for Turbulent Reacting Flow", Phys. Fluids A 5(2), 1993
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Klimenko A. Y.: "Multicomponent diffusion of various scalars in turbulent flow." Fluid Dyn. 25, 327, 1990
- ↑ Branley N., Jones W.P.: "Large eddy simulations of a turbulent non-premixed flame", Combustion and Flame, vol. 127, 2001
Simulation Case CFD3
Solution Strategy
In the CFD3 case the steady flamelet concept was applied with the dynamic
SGS model for turbulence.
Computational Domain
The computational domain for CFD3 was the same as for CFD1 and CFD2.
Boundary Conditions
The boundary conditions were the same as for CFD1 and CFD2.
Application of Physical Models
The same chemical kinetics as for CFD1 and steady flamelet approach as
for CFD1 were used. For turbulence, the standard Germano dynamic model was used.
Numerical Accuracy
The BOFFIN code is second order accurate in space and time.
CFD Results
CFD3 – steady flamelet model with dynamic Germano subgrid model for
turbulence; all data files are in the Tecplot format.
cfd31.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along the jet flame axis
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd32.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 15
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd33.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 30
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd34.dat – axial and radial mean and fluctuating velocity profiles along radius at z/D = 45
- ASCII file; 5 columns:
cfd35.dat – mean and fluctuating temperature, mixture fraction and mass fractions of chosen species along the jet flame axis
- ASCII file; 19 columns:
Contributed by: Andrzej Boguslawski, Artur Tyliszczak — Częstochowa University of Technology
© copyright ERCOFTAC 2011