CFD modelling of turbulent non-premixed combustion

The thesis comprises of a thorough assessment of turbulent non-premixed combustion modelling techniques, emphasising the fundamental issue of turbulence-chemistry interaction. The combustion models studied are the flame-sheet, equilibrium, eddy breakup and laminar flamelet models. An in-house CFD code is developed and all the combustion models are implemented. Fundamental numerical issues involving the discretisation schemes are addressed by employing three discretisation schemes namely, hybrid, power law and TVD. The combustion models are evaluated for a number of fuels ranging from simple H2/CO and CO/H2/N2 to more complex Cl4/H2 burning in bluff body stabilised burners at different inlet fuel velocities. The bluff body burner with its complex recirculation zone provides a suitable model problem for industrial flows. The initial and boundary conditions are simple and well-defined. The bluff body burner also provides a controlled environment for the study of turbulence-chemistry interaction at the neck zone. The high quality experimental database available from the University of Sydney and other reported measurements are used for the validation and evaluation of combustion models. The present calculations show that all the combustion models provide good predictions for near equilibrium flames for temperature and major species. Although the equilibrium chemistry model is capable of predicting minor species, the predictive accuracy is found to be inadequate when compared to the experimental data. The laminae flamelet model is the only model which has yielded good predictions for the minor species. For flames at higher velocities. the laminar flamelet model again has provided better predictions compared to predictions of other models considered. With different fuels, the laminar flamelet model predictions for CO/H2/N2 fuel are better than those for CH4/H2 fuel. The reasons for this discrepancy are discussed in detail. The effects of differential diffusion are studied in the laminar flamelet modelling strategy. The flamelet with unity Lewis number is found to give a better representation of the transport of species. The laminar flamelet model has yielded reasonably good predictions for NO mass fraction. The predictions of NO mass fraction are found to be very sensitive to differential diffusion effects. This study has also considered the issue of inclusion of radiative heat transfer in the laminar flamelet model. The radiation effects are found to be important only where the temperature is very high. The study undertaken and reported in this thesis shows that the presently available laminar flamelet modelling concepts are capable of predicting species concentrations and temperature fields with an adequate degree of accuracy. The flamelet model is also well suited for the prediction of NO emissions. The inclusion of radiation heat transfer has enhanced the predictive capability of the laminar flamelet model.