The present study addresses a new effort to improve the prediction of
turbulent heat transfer and NO emission in non-premixed methane-air
combustion. In this regard, a symmetric combustion chamber in a
stoichiometric condition is numerically simulated using the Reynolds
averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The Realizable k-? model and Discreate
Ordinate are applied for modeling turbulence and radiation, respectively.
Also, the eddy dissipation model is adopted for predicting the turbulent
chemical reaction rate. Zeldovich mechanism is applied for estimating the NO
emission. Higher-order generalized gradient diffusion hypothesis (HOGGDH) is
employed for predicting the turbulent heat flux in turbulent reactive flows.
Results show that the HOGGDH model is capable of predicting temperature
distribution in good agreement with the available experimental data.
Comparison of the results obtained by the simple eddy diffusivity (SED) and
HOGGDH models shows that applying the HOGGDH significantly improves the
over-prediction of NO emission. Finally, the average turbulent Prandtl
number for the non-premixed methane-air combustion has been calculated.