a b s t r a c tThis paper investigates one issue related to Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of self-excited combustion instabilities in gas-fueled swirled burners: the effects of incomplete mixing between fuel and air at the combustion chamber inlet. Perfect premixing of the gases entering the combustion chamber is rarely achieved in practical applications and this study investigates its impact by comparing LES assuming perfect premixing and LES where the fuel jets are resolved so that fuel/air mixing is explicitely computed. This work demonstrates that the perfect premixing assumption is reasonable for stable flows but is not acceptable to predict self-excited unstable cases. This is shown by comparing LES and experimental fields in terms of mean and RMS fields of temperature, species, velocities as well as mixture fraction pdfs and unsteady activity for two regimes: a stable one at equivalence ratio 0.83 and an unstable one at 0.7. IntroductionThe instabilities of swirled turbulent flows have been the subject of intense research in the last ten years. One important issue has been to identify the possibilities offered by simulation and especially Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to predict self-excited combustion oscillations. The specific example of swirled combustors where flames couple with acoustic modes has received significant attention [1-4] because such oscillations are often found in real gas turbines [5,6]. An important question in swirled unstable flames is the effect of mixing on stability. In most real systems, combustion is not fully premixed and even in laboratories, very few swirled flames are truly fully premixed. The effects of equivalence ratio fluctuations on flame stability in combustors have been known for a long time [7,8]: changes in air inlet velocity induce variations of the flow rate through the flame but may also induce mixing fluctuations and the introduction into the combustion zone of nonconstant equivalence ratio pockets. These pockets create unsteady combustion and can generate instabilities.In many experiments, LES is performed assuming perfect mixing mainly because the computational work is simpler: there is no need to mesh the fuel injection holes or to resolve the zone where these jets mix with air. However, this assumption totally eliminates fluctuations of equivalence ratio as a mechanism of instability, thereby limiting the validity of the LES. One specific example of such limitations is reported in the experiment of [9][10][11] which has been computed by multiple groups [12][13][14][15][16]. This methane/air swirled combustor was especially built to study combustion instabilities in such systems and for all computations up to now, perfect mixing has been assumed by LES experts because methane was injected in the swirler, far upstream of the combustor, suggesting that perfect mixing is achieved before the combustion zone. Interestingly, all computations performed with perfect mixing assumptions have failed to predict the unstable modes observed in the experiments. Moreover, recent...

International audienceA reduced two-step scheme (called 2S KERO BFER) for kerosene-air premixed flames is presented in the context of Large Eddy Simulation of reacting turbulent flows in industrial applications. The chemical mechanism is composed of two re- actions corresponding to the fuel oxidation into CO and H2O, and the CO − CO2 equilibrium. To ensure the validity of the scheme for rich combustion, the pre- exponential constants of the two reactions are tabulated versus the local equiva- lence ratio. The fuel and oxidizer exponents are chosen to guarantee the correct dependence of laminar flame speed with pressure. Due to a lack of experimen- tal results, the detailed mechanism of Dagaut composed of 209 species and 1673 reactions, and the skeletal mechanism of Luche composed of 91 species and 991 reactions have been used to validate the reduced scheme. Computations of one- dimensional laminar flames have been performed with the 2S KERO BFER scheme using the CANTERA and COSILAB softwares for a wide range of pressure ([1;12] atm), fresh gas temperature ([300;700] K), and equivalence ratio ([0.6;2.0]). Results show that the flame speed is correctly predicted for the whole range of parameters, showing a maximum for stoichiometric flames, a decrease for rich combustion and a satisfactory pressure dependence. The burnt gas temperature and the dilution by Exhaust Gas Recirculation are also well reproduced. Moreover, the results for ignition delay time are in good agreement with the experiments

Due to their negative impacts on environment and human health, future regulations on soot emissions are expected to become stricter, in particular by controlling the size of the emitted particles. Therefore, the development of precise and sophisticated models describing the soot production, such as sectional

International audienceTabulated chemistry is a popular technique to account for detailed chemical effects with an affordable computational cost in gaseous combustion systems. How- ever its performances for spray combustion have not completely been identified. The present article discusses the chemical structure modeling of spray flames us- ing tabulated chemistry methods under the hypothesis that the chemical subspace accessed by a two-phase reactive flow can be mapped by a collection of gaseous flamelets. It is shown that tabulated chemistry methods based either on pure pre- mixed flamelets or on pure non-premixed flamelets fail to capture the structure of spray combustion. The reason is the complexity of the chemical structure of spray flames which exhibits both premixed-like and non-premixed-like reaction zones. To overcome this issue, a new multi-regime flamelet combustion model (called Partially-Premixed Flamelet Tabulation 2PFT) is presented in this paper. Information from premixed, partially-premixed and diffusion flames are stored in a 3-D look-up table parametrized as function of the progress variable Yc, de- scribing the progress of the reaction, the mixture fraction Yz, denoting the local equivalence ratio, and the scalar dissipation, which identifies the combustion regime. The performances of the 2PFT method are evaluated on counterflow laminar spray flames for different injection conditions of droplet diameter, liquid volume fraction and velocity. The 2PFT tabulation method better describes the chemical structure of spray flames compared to the classical techniques based on single archetypal flamelets. These results also confirm that the chemical structure of laminar spray flame can be modeled by a multi-regime flamelet combustion model based on gaseous flamelets

Soot control raises important fundamental issues and industrial challenges, which require a comprehensive understanding of processes governing its formation, interactions and destruction in turbulent flames. A physical insight of the soot space-time evolution in a turbulent diffusion flame is reported in this article by combining three simultaneous high sampling rate imaging diagnostics operating at a frame rate of 10 kHz: light scattering from soot particles, planar

Accurate characterization of swirled flames is a key point in the development of more efficient and safer aeronautical engines. The task is even more challenging for spray injection systems. From one side, spray interacts with both turbulence and flame, eventually affecting the flame dynamics. On the other side, the structure of turbulent spray flame is highly complex due to equivalence ratio inhomogeneities caused by evaporation and mixing processes. The first objective of this work is to numerically characterize the structure and dynamics of a swirled spray flame. The target configuration is the experimental benchmark named MERCATO, representative of an actual turbojet injection system. Due to the complex nature of the flame, a detailed description of chemical kinetics is necessary and is here obtained by using a 24-species chemical scheme, which has been expressly developed for DNS of spray flames. The first LES of a swirled spray flame using such a detailed chemical description is performed here and results are analyzed to study the complex interactions between the spray, the turbulent flow and the flame. It is observed that this coupling has an effect on the flame structure and that flame dynamics are governed by the interactions between spray, precessing vortex core and flame front. Even if such a detailed kinetic description leads to an accurate characterization of the flame, it is still highly expensive in terms of CPU time. Tabulated techniques have been expressly developed to account for detailed chemistry at a reduced computational cost in purely gaseous configurations. The second objective is then to verify the capability of the FPI tabulated chemistry method to correctly reproduce the spray flame characteristics by performing LES. To do this, results with the FPI method are compared to the experimental database and to the results obtained with the 24-species description in terms of mean and fluctuating axial gas velocity and liquid phase characteristics (droplet diameter and liquid velocity). Moreover, the flame characterization obtained with the FPI approach is compared to the results of the 24-species scheme focusing on the flame structure, on major and minor species concentrations as well as on pollutant emissions. The potential and the limits of the tabulated approach for spray flame are finally assessed.

Due to their low chemical time scales, the production of soot particles in turbulent di↵usion flames is highly impacted by large range of local strain rate fluctuations. In order to understand the response of soot production to strain rate fluctuations, unsteady laminar counterflow di↵usion flames with an imposed oscillating strain rate are investigated both analytically and numerically. First an analytical linearized model is developed to predict the unsteady response of a flame quantity of interest from information on laminar steady flames. Three critical parameters governing flame response are identified: the Stokes number which compares the characteristic time associated to the mean imposed strain rate to the oscillation frequency, the Damköhler number associated to the quantity of interest, and a third one characterizing the response of this quantity to an imposed steady strain rate. This model is then applied to soot predictions. Parallely, the response of soot production in propane-air counterflow di↵usion flames to unsteady strain harmonic oscillations is studied numerically using a detailed sectional soot model. A wide range of frequencies and amplitudes are considered. A specific trend is highlighted for soot precursors and particles production according to their respective chemical time scales: the bigger the PAH or soot particle, the higher its chemical time scale, resulting in a more damped and phase-lagged response. The particle size distribution evolves accordingly during the considered oscillations, so that the quasi-steady state behaviour is not verified for high frequencies. The numerical results are compared to those obtained by the analytical approach and a very good agreement is obtained at low amplitudes. Non-linear response of soot precursors and soot particles production to strain oscillations are finally discussed in case of high oscillation amplitudes and the limits of the proposed analytical model are identified.

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