Computational Modeling and Analysis of Diesel-fuel Injection and Autoignition at Transcritical Conditions

The need for improved engine efficiencies has motivated the development of high-pressure combustion systems, in which operating conditions achieve and exceed critical conditions. Associated with these conditions are strong variations in thermo-transport properties as the fluid undergoes phase transition, and two-stage ignition with low-temperature combustion. Accurately simulating these physical phenomena at real-fluid environments remains a challenge. By addressing this issue, a high-fidelity LES-modeling framework is developed to conduct simulations of transcritical fuel spray mixing and auto-ignition at high-pressure conditions. The simulation is based on a recently developed diffused interface method that solves the compressible multi-species conservation equations along with a Peng-Robinson state equation and real-fluid transport properties. LES analysis is performed for non-reacting and reacting spray conditions targeting the ECN Spray A configuration at chamber conditions with a pressure of 60 bar and temperatures between 900 K and 1200 K to investigate effects of the real-fluid environment and low-temperature chemistry. Comparisons with measurements in terms of global spray parameters (i.e., liquid and vapor penetration lengths) are shown to be in good agreement. Analysis of the mixture fraction distributions in the dispersed spray region demonstrates the accuracy in modelling the turbulent mixing behavior. Good agreement of the ignition delay time and the lift-off length is obtained from simulation results at different ambient temperature conditions and the formation of intermediate species is captured by the simulations, indicating that the presented numerical framework adequately reproduces the corresponding low- and high-temperature ignition processes under high-pressure conditions, which are relevant to realistic diesel-fuel injection systems.Comment: THIESEL 2018 Conference on Thermo- and Fluid Dynamic Processes in Direct Injection Engine

Efficient time stepping for reactive turbulent simulations with stiff chemistry

A combination of a steady-state preserving operator splitting method and a semi-implicit integration scheme is proposed for efficient time stepping in simulations of unsteady reacting flows, such as turbulent flames, using detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms. The operator splitting is based on the Simpler balanced splitting method, which is constructed with improved stability properties and reduced computational cost. The method is shown to be capable of stable and accurate prediction of ignition and extinction for reaction-diffusion systems near critical conditions. The ROK4E scheme is designed for semi-implicit integration of spatially independent chemically reacting systems. Being a Rosenbrock-Krylov method, ROK4E utilizes the low-rank approximation of the Jacobian to reduce the cost for integrating the system of ODEs that have relative few stiff components. The efficiency of the scheme is further improved via the careful choice of coefficients to require three right-hand-side evaluations over four stages. Combing these two methods, efficient calculation is achieved for large-scale parallel simulations of turbulent flames

Transcritical Mixing and Auto-Ignition of n-dodecane Liquid Fuel using a Diffused Interface Method

High-fidelity simulations of transcritical spray mixing and auto ignition in a combustion chamber are performed at high pressure and temperature conditions using a recently developed finite rate LES solver. The simulation framework is based on a diffused-interface (DI) method that solves the compressible multi-species conservation equations along with the Peng Robinson state equation and real-fluid transport properties. A finite volume approach with entropy stable scheme is employed to accurate simulate the non-linear real fluid flow. LES analysis is performed for non-reacting and reacting spray conditions targeting the ECN Spray A configuration at chamber conditions with a pressure of 60 bar and temperatures between 800 K and 1200 K to investigate effects of the real-fluid environment and low-temperature chemistry. Comparisons with measurements in terms of global spray parameters and mixture fraction distributions demonstrates the accuracy in modeling the turbulent mixing behavior. Good overall agreement of the auto-ignition process is obtained from simulation results at different ambient temperature conditions and the formation of intermediate species is captured by the simulations, indicating that the presented numerical framework adequately reproduces the corresponding low-and-high-temperature ignition processes under high-pressure conditions that are relevant to realistic diesel fuel injection systems.Comment: AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum, July 9-11, 2018, Cincinnati, Ohio. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.08721, arXiv:1705.0723

Modeling and Simulation of Diesel Injection at Transcritical Conditions

The need for improved engine efficiencies has motivated the development of high-pressure combustion systems, in which operating conditions achieve and exceed critical conditions. Associated with these conditions are large thermodynamic gradients and strong variations in transport properties as the fluid undergoes mixing and phase transition. Accurately simulating these real-fluid environments remains a main challenge. Different modeling approaches have been employed, which can be categorized as diffused and sharp interface methods. The objective of this study is to examine the diffused interface method for simulating diesel-fuel injection at conditions related to the supercritical regime. To this end, a recently developed compressible real-fluid solver for transcritical conditions is employed. Simulations of an ECN-relevant diesel-fuel injector are performed and predictions for instantaneous and statistical flow-field results are compared against available measurements. It is expected that results from this analysis will be useful in identifying limitations of current modeling techniques and in improving physical and numerical models for high-pressure injection systems.Comment: ILASS-Americas 201

Numerical methods to prevent pressure oscillations in transcritical flows

The accurate and robust simulation of transcritical real-fluid effects is crucial for many engineering applications, such as fuel injection in internal combustion engines, rocket engines and gas turbines. For example, in diesel engines, the liquid fuel is injected into the ambient gas at a pressure that exceeds its critical value, and the fuel jet will be heated to a supercritical temperature before combustion takes place. This process is often referred to as transcritical injection. The largest thermodynamic gradient in the transcritical regime occurs as the fluid undergoes a liquid-like to a gas-like transition when crossing the pseudo-boiling line (Yang 2000, Oschwald et al. 2006, Banuti 2015). The complex processes during transcritical injection are still not well understood. Therefore, to provide insights into high-pressure combustion systems, accurate and robust numerical simulation tools are required for the characterization of supercritical and transcritical flows.Comment: Annual Research Briefs 2016, Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford Universit

The Galactic Census of High- and Medium-mass Protostars. II. Luminosities and Evolutionary States of a Complete Sample of Dense Gas Clumps

(Abridged) The Census of High- and Medium-mass Protostars (CHaMP) is the first large-scale (280 degree<l<300 degree, -4 degree<b<2 degree), unbiased, sub-parsec resolution survey of Galactic molecular clumps and their embedded stars. Barnes et al. (2011) presented the source catalog of ~300 clumps based on HCO+(1-0) emission, used to estimate masses M. Here we use archival mid-infrared to mm continuum data to construct spectral energy distributions. Fitting two-temperature grey-body models, we derive bolometric luminosities, L. We find the clumps have 10Lsun<L<1E6.5Lsun and 0.1<L/M<1E3, consistent with theoretical expectations of a clump population that spans a range of instantaneous star formation efficiencies from 0 to ~50%. We thus expect L/M to be a useful, strongly-varying indicator of clump evolution during the star cluster formation process. We find correlations of the ratio of warm to cold component fluxes and of cold component temperature with L/M. We also find a near linear relation between L/M and Spitzer-IRAC specific intensity (surface brightness), which may thus also be useful as a star formation efficiency indicator. The lower bound of the clump $L/M$ distribution suggests the star formation efficiency per free-fall time is epsilon<0.2. We do not find strong correlations of L/M with mass surface density, velocity dispersion or virial parameter. We find a linear relation between L and L_{HCO+(1-0}}, although with large scatter for any given individual clump. Fitting together with extragalactic systems, the linear relation still holds, extending over 10 orders of magnitude in luminosity. The complete nature of the CHaMP survey over a several kiloparsec-scale region allows us to derive a measurement at an intermediate scale bridging those of individual clumps and whole galaxies.Comment: Revisions have been made. Accepted to Ap

Direct numerical simulations of turbulent channel flow under transcritical conditions

Turbulent flows under transcritical conditions are present in regenerative cooling systems of rocker engines and extraction processes in chemical engineering. The turbulent flows and the corresponding heat transfer phenomena in these complex processes are still not well understood experimentally and numerically. The objective of this work is to investigate the turbulent flows under transcritical conditions using DNS of turbulent channel flows. A fully compressible solver is used in conjunction with a Peng-Robinson real-fluid equation of state to describe the transcritical flows. A channel flow with two isothermal walls is simulated with one heated and one cooled boundary layers. The grid resolution adopted in this study is slightly finer than that required for DNS of incompressible channel flows. The simulations are conducted using both fully (FC) and quasi-conservative (QC) schemes to assess their performance for transcritical wall-bounded flows. The instantaneous flows and the statistics are analyzed and compared with the canonical theories. It is found that results from both FC and QC schemes qualitatively agree well with noticeable difference near the top heated wall, where spurious oscillations in velocity can be observed. Using the DNS data, we then examine the usefulness of Townsend attached eddy hypothesis in the context of flows at transcritical conditions. It is shown that the streamwise energy spectrum exhibits the inverse wavenumber scaling and that the streamwise velocity structure function follows a logarithmic scaling, thus providing support to the attached eddy model at transcritical conditions.Comment: AIAA SciTech 2018, Kissimmee, F

Lyapunov exponent and Wasserstein metric as validation tools for assessing short-time dynamics and quantitative model evaluation of large-eddy simulation

In this work, methods for the evaluation of LES-quality and LES-accuracy are presented, which include the Lyapunov exponent for the analysis of short-time predictability of LES-calculation and the Wasserstein metric for the quantitative assessment of simulation results. Both methods are derived and evaluated in application to the Volvo test case. Both the non-reacting and reacting cases are calculated. For the non- reacting cases, good agreement with the experimental data is achieved by solvers at high numerical resolution. The reacting cases are more challenging due to the small length scale of the flame and the suppression of sinuous mode of absolute instability by the density ratio. The analysis of the turbulent simulation data using the concept of the Lyapunov exponent and the Wasserstein metric provides a more quantitative approach to assess the mesh dependency of the simulation results. The convergence of the Lyapunov exponent is shown to be a more sensitive and stronger indication of mesh-independence. Though grid convergence for the reacting cases cannot be reached with the chosen resolutions, the Lyapunov exponents and the Wasserstein metric are shown to be capable of identifying quantity-specific sensitivities with respect to the numerical resolution, while requiring significantly less computational resources than acquiring profiles of conventional turbulent statistics.Comment: 2018 AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting, Kissimmee, F

Application of Pareto-efficient combustion modeling framework to large eddy simulations of turbulent reacting flows

In the application of the combustion models based on low-dimensional manifolds (for instance flamelet models) to large-eddy simulation (LES) of reactive turbulent flows, the modeling simplifications of the combustion process is a critical source of uncertainty in addition to those due to the turbulent closure model and numerical discretization. The ability to quantitatively assess this uncertainty in absence of the reference result is vital to the reliable and predictive simulations of practical combustion devices.In the present study, the Pareto-efficient combustion (PEC) framework is extended to adaptive LES combustion simulations of turbulent flames. The key component of the PEC framework is the so-called manifold drift term. Its extension LES is proposed to make such assessment by examining the compliance of a particular combustion model in describing a quantity of interest with respect to the underlying flow field representation. With the focus on improving predictions of CO emissions of flamelet-based combustion models, this work employs PEC to augment the flamelet/progress variable (FPV) model through local sub-model assignment of the finite-rate chemistry (FRC) model. To this end, a series of LES-PEC calculations are performed on a piloted partially-premixed dimethyl ether flame (DME-D), using a combination of FPV and FRC models. The drift term is utilized in the PEC framework to the estimate the model related error for quantities of interest. The PEC approach is demonstrated to be capable of significantly improving the prediction of CO emissions compared with the monolithic FPV simulation. The improved accuracy is achieved by enriching the FPV model with FRC in regions where the lower-order model is determined insufficient through the evaluation of drift terms

MVP-Workshop Contribution: Modeling of Volvo Bluff Flame Experiment and Comparison of Finite-Volume and Discontinuous-Galerkin Schemes

The Volvo burner features the canonical configuration of a bluff-body stabilized premixed flame. This configuration was studied experimentally under the Volvo Flygmotor AB program. Two cases are considered in this study: a non-reacting case with an inlet flow speed of 16.6 m/s and a reacting case with equilibrium ratio of 0.65 and inflow speed of 17.3 m/s. The characteristic vortex shedding in the wake behind the bluff body is present in the non-reacting case, while two oscillation modes are intermittently present in the reacting case. A series of large-eddy simulations are performed on this configuration using two solvers, one using a high-resolution finite-volume (FV) scheme and the other featuring a high-order discontinuous-Galerkin (DG) discretization. The FV calculations are conducted on hexahedral meshes with three different resolution (4mm, 2mm, and 1mm). The DG calculations are performed using two different polynomial orders on the same tetrahedral mesh. For the non-reacting cases, good agreement with respect to the experimental data is achieved by both solvers at high numerical resolution. The reacting cases are calculated using a two-step global mechanism in combination with the thickened-flame model. Reasonable agreement with experiments is obtained by both solvers at higher resolution. Models for combustion-turbulence interaction are necessary for the reacting case as it contains the length scale of the flame, which is smaller than the grid resolution in all calculations. The impact of such models on the flame stability and flow/flame dynamics is the subject of future research