A generalized spray-flamelet formulation by means of a monotonic variable

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new monotonic cumulative mixture fraction variable, Z_C, for spray-flamelet modeling, improving the description of spray flames by accounting for droplet vaporization effects and enabling better mapping of flame structures.

Contribution

A novel cumulative mixture fraction variable, Z_C, is proposed to handle non-monotonicity in spray-flamelet descriptions, extending the flamelet model to spray flames with vaporization effects.

Findings

Z_C is monotonic and generalizes the mixture fraction for spray flames.

The new formulation accurately maps spray-flame structures in physical space.

Numerical results for ethanol and methanol sprays validate the approach.

Abstract

The external structure of the spray-flamelet can be described using the Schvab-Zel'dovich-Li\~nan formulation. The gaseous mixture-fraction variable as function of the physical space, Z(x_i), typically employed for the description of gaseous diffusion flames leads to non-monotonicity behaviour for spray flames due to the extra fuel supplied by vaporisation of droplets distributed into the flow. As a result, the overall properties of spray flames depend not only on Z and the scalar dissipation rate, but also on the spray source term, S_v. We propose a new general coordinate variable which takes into account the spatial information about the entire mixture fraction due to the gaseous phase and droplet vaporisation. This coordinate variable, Z_C(x_i) is based on the cumulative value of the gaseous mixture fraction Z(x_i), and is shown to be monotonic. For pure gaseous flow, the new cumulative function, Z_C, yields the well-established flamelet structure in Z-space. In the present manuscript, the spray-flamelet structure and the new equations for temperature and mass fractions in terms of Z_C are derived and then applied to the canonical counterflow configuration with potential flow. Numerical results are obtained for ethanol and methanol sprays, and the effect of Lewis and Stokes numbers on the spray-flamelet structure are analyzed. The proposed formulation agrees well when mapping the structure back to physical space thereby confirming our integration methodology.