Large eddy simulation of a supersonic lifted hydrogen flame with perfectly stirred reactor model

TL;DR

This paper develops a LES-PSR model to simulate supersonic hydrogen combustion, accurately capturing shock structures, flame stabilization, and species distributions, with validation against experimental data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a LES-PSR modeling approach that accounts for viscous heating and compressibility effects, improving simulation accuracy of supersonic hydrogen flames.

Findings

Shock wave and flame structures are accurately captured.

Velocity and mixture fraction statistics agree with experiments.

The model predicts temperature and species mole fractions well, with some under-predictions in temperature RMS.

Abstract

Large Eddy Simulation with a Perfectly Stirred Reactor model (LES-PSR) is developed to simulate supersonic combustion with high-enthalpy flow conditions. The PSR model considers the viscous heating and compressibility effects on the thermo-chemical state, through correcting the chemical source term for progress variable and incorporating absolute enthalpy as the control variable for the look-up table. It is firstly validated by using a priori analysis of the viscous heating and compressibility effects. Then an auto-igniting hydrogen flame stabilized in supersonic vitiated co-flowing jet is simulated with LES-PSR method. The results show that the shock wave structure, overall flame characteristics, flame-shock interaction and lift-off height are accurately captured. Good agreements of the velocity and mixture fraction statistics with the experimental data are observed. The results also show that the LES-PSR model can predict the mean temperature and mole fractions of major species quite well in both flame induction and stabilization zones. However, there are some under-predictions of temperature RMS by about 100-150 K, which may be due to the chemical non-equilibrium in the H2/O2-enriched combustion product of the co-flowing jet. The scatter plots of two probe locations respectively from induction and flame zones show that the respective flame structures in mixture fraction space are captured well. However, the flucturations of the temperature and species mole fractions are under-predicted in the flame zone. The shock-induced auto-igniting spots are captured by the PSR model. These spots are highly unsteady and play an important role in flame stabilization. It is also shown that the intense reactions are initiated at mixture fractions around the stoichiometry or fuel-lean values, corresponding to local elevated pressure (1.5-2.0 atm) due to shock compression.