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Title: Basic research model of natural gas combustion in turbulent flow. Phase 2, Annual report, 1 August 1991-31 July 1992

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:6700771

The report describes progress made in the past twelve months in developing a local integral method (LIM) model for numerically simulating natural gas mixing and combustion in complex flames. The LIM model is fundamentally different from conventional approaches for numerically simulating combustion in turbulent flames. It is based on the experimental observation that the strain-diffusion balance which establishes the mixing and reaction scales in turbulent flames leads to a self-similar internal structure in the diffusion-reaction layers which does not need to be continually re-computed. Instead, these diffusion and reaction scales are represented by a set of self-similar profile shapes whose moments are allowed to evolve freely to satisfy the governing equations. The resulting LIM computations thus need only follow the evolution of material surface in the flow, and then solve ODE's (ordinary differential equations) on the surface, rather than PDE's (partial differential equations) throughout the whole flame. Results obtained to date show that the model is capable of correctly predicting even highly sensitive non-linear characteristics associated with the combustion processes in turbulent natural gas flames, including the local flame extinction phenomenon in large Zeldovich number Arrhenius kinetics. The simplicity of the LIM technique allows large reductions in computational time in comparison with traditional computational approaches, thus allowing far more complex reaction chemistry to be addressed, as well as ranges of Reynolds, Schmidt and Damkohler numbers which are otherwise completely inaccessible to simulation.

Research Organization:
Michigan Univ., Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
OSTI ID:
6700771
Report Number(s):
PB-93-158509/XAB; CNN: GRI-5088-260-1692
Resource Relation:
Other Information: See also PB--92-190362
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English