The present work reports on LES of turbulent reacting flow of the Delft-Jet-in-Hot-Coflow (DJHC) burner, emulating MILD combustion, with transported PDF based combustion models using ANSYS FLUENT 13.0. Two different eddy viscosity models for LES (Dynamic Smagorinsky and Kinetic Energy Transport) along with two solution approaches for PDF transport equation, i.e. Eulerian and Lagrangian, have been used in the present study. Moreover, the effects of chemical kinetics and the micro-mixing models have also been investigated for two different fuel jet Reynolds number (Re = 4,100 and Re = 8,800). The mean velocity and turbulent kinetic energy predicted by the different models are in good agreement with experimental data. Both the composition PDF models predict an early ignition resulting in higher radial mean temperature predictions at burner exit. The models, however, correctly predict the formation mechanism of ignition kernels and the decreasing trend of the lift-off height with increasing jet Reynolds number, as observed experimentally.

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a b s t r a c tSoot formation in 'Delft Flame III', a pilot stabilized turbulent diffusion flame burning natural gas/air, is investigated using ANSYS FLUENT by considering two different approaches for soot inception. In the first approach soot inception is based on the formation rate of acetylene, while the second approach considers the formation rate of two and three-ringed aromatics to describe the soot inception (Hall et al., 1997). Transport equations are solved for soot mass fraction and radical nuclei concentration to describe inception, coagulation, surface growth, and oxidation processes. The turbulent-chemistry interactions and soot precursors are described by the steady laminar flamelet model (SLFM). Two chemical mechanisms GRI 3.0 (Gregory et al.) and POLIMI (Ranzi et al., 2012) are used to represent the effect of species concentration on soot formation. The radiative properties of the medium are included based on the nongray modeling approach by considering four factious gases; the weighted sum of gray gas (WSGGM) approach is used to model the absorption coefficient. The effect of soot on radiative transfer is modeled in terms of effective absorption coefficient of the medium. A beta probability density function (b-PDF) in terms of normalized temperature is used to describe the effect of turbulence on soot formation. The results clearly elucidate the strong effect of radiation and species concentration on soot volume fraction predictions. Due to increase in radiative heat loss with soot, flame temperature decreases slightly. The inclusion of ethylene has less synergic effect than that of both benzene and ethylene. Both cases have less impact on the nucleation of soot. The increase in soot volume fraction with soot-turbulence interaction is in consistence with the DNS predictions.

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In the present paper, the flames from DJHC burner, imitating MILD (Moderate and Intense Low Oxygen Dilution) combustion, are simulated using PDF transport modeling. Two different solution approaches have been used to resolve the joint composition PDF. First, a Lagrangian approach is used to solve the joint composition PDF, while in the second approach, the approximate solution is achieved by using presumed shape PDF and DQMOM-IEM modeling known as Multi-Environment Eulerian PDF (MEPDF). A quantitative comparison of the predictions from these two solution methods has been performed for two different jet Reynolds number, i.e. Re = 4100 & 8800. Moreover, the effect of molecular diffusion is also explored by comparing the predictions using different micro-mixing models such as Coalescence Dispersion (CD), Euclidean Minimum Spanning Tree (EMST), and Interaction-by-Exchange-with-Mean (IEM) model. The obtained numerical predictions from both approaches are compared with the experimental data to highlight the accuracy as well as the predictive capability of these models. In the case of low Reynolds number (Re = 4100), it is observed that the mean axial velocity and turbulent kinetic energy profiles are in good agreement with the measurements while the temperature profiles are slightly over-predicted in the downstream region. Although MEPDF results are in good agreement with the LPDF results, both the model predictions tend to exhibit discrepancies at higher Reynolds number.