Dr. Darabi is an ABET IDEAL Scholar and has led the MIE Department ABET team in two successful accreditations (2008 and 2014) of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering programs. Dr. Darabi has been the lead developer of several educational software systems as well as the author of multiple educational reports and papers. Dr. Darabi's research group uses Big Data, process mining, data mining, Operations Research, high performance computing, and visualization techniques to achieve its research and educational goals. Dr. Darabi's research has been funded by multiple federal and corporate sponsors including the National Science Foundation,
This paper presents recent research on the use of a Reynolds stress turbulence model (RSTM) for three-dimensional flowfield simulation inside gas turbine combustors. It intends to show the motivations for using the RSTM in engine flow simulation, to present a further validation of the RSTM implementation in the KIVA code using the available experimental data, and to provide comparisons between RSTM and k-ε turbulence model results for chemically nonreacting swirling flows. The results show that, for high-degree swirl flow, the RSTM can provide predictions in favorable agreement with the experimental data, and that the RSTM predicts recirculations and high velocity gradients better than does the k-ε turbulence model. The results also indicate that the choice of swirler has a significant influence on the structure of the combustor flowfield.
The flowfield in a lean-direct injection (LDI) combustor with discrete-jet swirlers is described and analyzed using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code with a Reynolds stress turbulence model (RSTM). The results from the RSTM are compared to time-averaged laser-Doppler velocimetry (LDV) data, as well as results from the National Combustion Code (NCC) that has a cubic nonlinear κ-ε turbulence model, and from the KIVA code using the standard κ-ε model. The comparisons of results indicate that the RSTM accurately describes the flow details and resolves recirculation zones and high velocity gradients while the κ-ε models are unable to capture most flow structures. This confirms that, within the Reynolds averaging approach, the higher-order RSTM is preferred for simulating complex flowfields where separations, strong anisotropy, and high swirl are present.
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