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Reynolds number scaling of burning rates in spherical turbulent premixed flames

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

Tejas Kulkarni Open the ORCID record for Tejas Kulkarni [Opens in a new window] ,
Romain Buttay ,
M. Houssem Kasbaoui Open the ORCID record for M. Houssem Kasbaoui [Opens in a new window] ,
Antonio Attili Open the ORCID record for Antonio Attili [Opens in a new window]  and
Fabrizio Bisetti Open the ORCID record for Fabrizio Bisetti [Opens in a new window]
Tejas Kulkarni*
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX78712, USA
Romain Buttay
Affiliation:
Clean Combustion Research Center (CCRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal23955, Saudi Arabia
M. Houssem Kasbaoui
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ85281, USA
Antonio Attili
Affiliation:
School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, EdinburghEH9 3FD, UK
Fabrizio Bisetti
Affiliation:
Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX78712, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: tukulkarni@utexas.edu
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Abstract

In the flamelet regime of turbulent premixed combustion the enhancement in the burning rates originates primarily from surface wrinkling. In this work we investigate the Reynolds number dependence of burning rates of spherical turbulent premixed methane/air flames in decaying isotropic turbulence with direct numerical simulations. Several simulations are performed by varying the Reynolds number, while keeping the Karlovitz number the same, and the temporal evolution of the flame surface is compared across cases by combining the probability density function of the radial distance of the flame surface from the origin with the surface density function formalism. Because the mean area of the wrinkled flame surface normalized by the area of a sphere with radius equal to the mean flame radius is proportional to the product of the turbulent flame brush thickness and peak surface density within the brush, the temporal evolution of the brush and peak surface density are investigated separately. The brush thickness is shown to scale with the integral scale of the flow, evolving due to decaying velocity fluctuations and stretch. When normalized by the integral scale, the wrinkling scale defined as the inverse of the peak surface density is shown to scale with Reynolds number across simulations and as turbulence decays. As a result, the area ratio and the burning rate are found to increase as ${Re}_{\lambda }^{1.13}$, in agreement with recent experiments on spherical turbulent premixed flames. We observe that the area ratio does not vary with turbulent intensity when holding the Reynolds number constant.

JFM classification

Reacting Flows: Turbulent reacting flows Turbulent Flows: Isotropic turbulence
Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 906 , 10 January 2021 , A2
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© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Kulkarni et al. supplementary movie 1

Volume rendering of the outwardly propagating flame front for the simulation R1 (blue colour), along with a planar cut showing the normalized velocity magnitude │V│/SL (white - yellow - red colours).

Download Kulkarni et al. supplementary movie 1(Video)
Video 1.1 MB

Kulkarni et al. supplementary movie 2

Volume rendering of the outwardly propagating flame front for the simulation R2 (blue colour), along with a planar cut showing the normalized velocity magnitude │V│/SL (white - yellow - red colours).

Download Kulkarni et al. supplementary movie 2(Video)
Video 1.3 MB

Kulkarni et al. supplementary movie 3

Volume rendering of the outwardly propagating flame front for the simulation R3s (blue colour), along with a planar cut showing the normalized velocity magnitude │V│/SL (white - yellow - red colours).

Download Kulkarni et al. supplementary movie 3(Video)
Video 950.9 KB