Modelling the NO emissions from wildfires at the source level

There is a growing interest to characterize fire plumes in order to control air quality during wildfire episodes and to estimate the carbon and ozone balance of fire emissions. A numerical approach has been used to study the mechanisms of NO formation at the source level in wildfires given that NO plays an important role in the formation of ground-level ozone. The major reaction mechanisms involved in NO chemistry have been identified using reaction path analysis. Accordingly, a two-step global kinetic scheme in the gas phase has been proposed herein to account for the volatile fuel-bound nitrogen (fuel-N) conversion to NO, considering that the volatile fraction of fuel-N is released as NH₃. Data from simulations using the perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) code from CHEMKIN-II package with a detailed kinetic mechanism (GDF-Kin^® 3.0) have been used to calibrate and evaluate the global model under typical wildfire conditions in terms of the composition of the degradation gases of vegetation, the equivalence ratio, the range of temperatures and the residence time

On the interaction of vortices with mixing layers

We describe the perturbations introduced by two counter-rotating vortices - in a two-dimensional configuration - or by a vortex ring - in an axisymmetric configuration - to the mixing layer between two counterflowing gaseous fuel and air streams of the same density. The analysis is confined to the near stagnation point region, where the strain rate of the unperturbed velocity field, A0, is uniform. We restrict our attention to cases where the typical distance 2r0 between the vortices - or the characteristic vortex ring radius r0 - is large compared to both the thickness, δv, of the vorticity core and the thickness, δm∼(ν/A0)1/2, of the mixing layer. In addition, we consider that the ratio, Γ/ν, of the vortex circulation, Γ, to the kinematic viscosity, ν, is large compared to unity. Then, during the interaction time, A0,-1, the viscous and diffusion effects are confined to the thin vorticity core and the thin mixing layer, which, when seen with the scale r0, appears as a passive interface between the two counterflowing streams when they have the same density. In this case, the analysis provides a simple procedure to describe the displacement and distortion of the interface, as well as the time evolution of the strain rate imposed on the mixing layer, which are needed to calculate the inner structure of the reacting mixing layer as well as the conditions for diffusion flame extinction and edge-flame propagation along the mixing layer. Although in the reacting case variable density effects due to heat release play an important role inside the mixing layer, in this paper the analysis of the inner structure is carried out using the constant density model, which provides good qualitative understanding of the mixing layer response

A three-equation model for the prediction of soot emissions in LES of gas turbines

International audienceThe design of new low-emission systems requires the development of models providing an accurate prediction of soot production for a small computational cost. In this work, a three-equation model is developed based on mono-disperse closure of the source terms from a sectional method. In addition, a post-processing technique to estimate the particles size distribution (PSD) from global quantities is proposed by combining Pareto and log-normal distributions. After validation, the developed strategy is used to perform a large eddy simulation of soot production in a model combustor representative of gas turbine combustion chambers. It is shown that the three-equation model is able to provide a good estimation of soot volume fraction and information on PSD in complex geometries for a low computational time

Theoretical and numerical analysis of the lattice kinetic scheme for complex-flow simulations

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Lattice Boltzmann advection-diffusion model for conjugate heat transfer in heterogeneous media

International audienceMany practical flow configurations involve energy transfer in fluids, or in solids and fluids with different thermo-physical properties. The classical advection-diffusion lattice Boltzmann (LB) solver admits some errors when dealing with such configurations. Given that the macroscopic equation recovered by this model is only valid in the limit of incompressible flows with constant heat capacities, one would, for example, observe inconsistent fluxes at the interface of a fluid and solid with different densities or specific heat capacities. This inconsistency being second-order in space, it will have non-negligible effects on the final results. In this work, a modified equilibrium distribution function (EDF) is proposed to overcome these issues. The proposed scheme recovers the correct partial differential equation (PDE) describing energy transfer, as shown by a multi-scale Chapman-Enskog analysis. The performance of the model is checked through a variety of test-cases, involving conjugate heat transfer and variable specific heat capacities in both steady and unsteady configurations. In all cases the obtained results are in excellent agreement with reference data

A tabulated chemistry method for spray combustion

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