Radiative heat transfer during turbulent combustion

We investigate the radiative heat transfer in a co-flowing turbulent nonpremixed propane-air flame inside a three-dimensional cylindrical combustion chamber. The radiation from the luminous flame, which is due to the appearance of soot particles in the flame, is studied here, through the balance equation of radiative transfer which is solved by the Discrete Ordinates Method (DOM) coupling with a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the flow, temperature, combustion species and soot formation. The effect of scattering is ignored as it is found that the absorption dominates the radiating medium. Assessments of the various orders of DOM are also made and we find that the results of the incident radiation predicted by the higher order approximations of the DOM are in good agreement

Numerical Methods for Radiative Transport Equations

In this dissertation, we present and analyze a discrete ordinates (S_N) discretization of a filtered radiative transport equation (RTE). Under certain conditions, S_N discretizations of the standard RTE create numeric artifacts, known as ``ray-effects ; the goal of using a filter is to remove such artifacts. We analyze convergence of the filtered discrete ordinates solution to the solution of the non-filtered RTE, taking into account the effect of the filter as well as the usual quadrature and truncation errors that arise in discrete ordinates methods.We also present a hybrid spatial discretization for the radiative transport equation that combines a second-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method and a second-order finite volume (FV) method. The strategy relies on a simple operator splitting that has been used previously to combine different angular discretizations. Unlike standard FV methods with upwind fluxes, the hybrid approach is able to accurately simulate problems in scattering dominated regimes. However, it requires less memory and yields a faster time to solution than a standard DG approach. In addition, the underlying splitting allows naturally for hybridization in both space and angle.We demonstrate, via the simulation of two benchmark problems, the effectiveness of the filtering approach in reducing ray effects. In addition, we also examine efficiency of both methods, in particular the balance between improved accuracy and additional cost of including the filter, and the ability of the spatial hybrid to leverage its efficiency to produce more accurate results

Combination of DOM with LES in a gas turbine combustor

A three-dimensional numerical study is conducted to investigate the radiative heat transfer in a model gas turbine combustor. The Discrete Ordinates Method (DOM/Sn) has been implemented to solve the filtered Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) for the radiation modelling and this has been combined with a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the flow, temperature and composition fields within the combustion chamber. The radiation considered in the present work is due only to the hot combustion gases notably carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour (H2O), which is also known as the ‘non-luminous’ radiation. A benchmark problem of the ideal furnace is considered first to examine the accuracy and computational efficiency of the DOM in the three-dimensional general body fitted co-ordinate systems

Unified Gas-kinetic Wave-Particle Methods III: Multiscale Photon Transport

In this paper, we extend the unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method to the multiscale photon transport. In this method, the photon free streaming and scattering processes are treated in an un-splitting way. The duality descriptions, namely the simulation particle and distribution function, are utilized to describe the photon. By accurately recovering the governing equations of the unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS), the UGKWP preserves the multiscale dynamics of photon transport from optically thin to optically thick regime. In the optically thin regime, the UGKWP becomes a Monte Carlo type particle tracking method, while in the optically thick regime, the UGKWP becomes a diffusion equation solver. The local photon dynamics of the UGKWP, as well as the proportion of wave-described and particle-described photons are automatically adapted according to the numerical resolution and transport regime. Compared to the $S_n$ -type UGKS, the UGKWP requires less memory cost and does not suffer ray effect. Compared to the implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method, the statistical noise of UGKWP is greatly reduced and computational efficiency is significantly improved in the optically thick regime. Several numerical examples covering all transport regimes from the optically thin to optically thick are computed to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the UGKWP method. In comparison to the $S_n$ -type UGKS and IMC method, the UGKWP method may have several-order-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost and memory requirement in solving some multsicale transport problems.Comment: 27 pages, 15 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1810.0598

A New Spherical Harmonics Scheme for Multi-Dimensional Radiation Transport I: Static Matter Configurations

Recent work by McClarren & Hauck [29] suggests that the filtered spherical harmonics method represents an efficient, robust, and accurate method for radiation transport, at least in the two-dimensional (2D) case. We extend their work to the three-dimensional (3D) case and find that all of the advantages of the filtering approach identified in 2D are present also in the 3D case. We reformulate the filter operation in a way that is independent of the timestep and of the spatial discretization. We also explore different second- and fourth-order filters and find that the second-order ones yield significantly better results. Overall, our findings suggest that the filtered spherical harmonics approach represents a very promising method for 3D radiation transport calculations.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures. Version matching the one in Journal of Computational Physic

Large eddy simulation of coal combustion

In this work an in-house code for large-eddy simulations of coal combustion is developed and tested, with a special focus on the issue of modelling radiative heat transfer effects inside a furnace. An Eulerian-Lagrangian approach is used to describe the continuous gas phase and the discrete particle phase, with a two-way coupling between the two phases (implemented by another group member). The radiative transfer equation is solved using the discrete ordinates method, testing several different angular and spatial discretisation schemes. The spectral properties of the participating media are approximated with different grey gas models of varying complexity and accuracy. The accuracy of the radiative solver is initially assessed on simple idealised static cases in both two- and three-dimensions, and validated against benchmark data found in literature. The code is then integrated, parallelised and optimised with the LES flow and combustion solver, and used to simulate a large 2.4 MW coal combustion furnace. The results of the simulations are compared quantitatively against experimental data in terms of velocity, temperature, species distribution and solid particle analysis, showing a good agreement overall. A parametric study is then also performed on the variables and parameters of the radiation solver, showing great sensitivity on the outcome of the simulations in certain cases, further highlighting the importance of accurate radiation modelling for closed coal combustion furnaces.Open Acces