Investigation of Conditional Source-term Estimation Approach to Modelling MILD Combustion

Abstract

Conditional Source-term Estimation (CSE) is a turbulent combustion model which uses conditional averages to provide closure for the mean chemical source term and is based on the same ideas as the Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) approach. CSE applies first order closure for the conditional averages which are obtained by inverting an integral equation and has been used to simulate a range of premixed, non-premixed and partially premixed flames. In the present study, CSE is applied to investigate a high efficient, low emission combustion process called Moderate and Intense Low Oxygen Dilution (MILD) combustion. This work represents the first application of CSE for MILD combustion, the first application of a multi-stream CSE formulation and the first doubly-conditioned CSE formulation applied in the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) framework.

The objectives of the present study are to i) investigate the CSE combustion model for turbulent non-premixed combustion, ii) develop a CSE formulation for MILD combustion problems, iii) implement CSE for MILD combustion problems in Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and LES and iv) compare the CSE predictions to experimental and previous numerical results for well documented MILD combustion flames.

Numerical simulations of a confined non-premixed methane flame are completed using the CSE non-premixed approach. This study investigates the sensitivity to various CSE model parameters and shows CSE is able to accurately predict non-premixed methane combustion. A detailed study of the inversion problem encountered in CSE is also investigated using the Bayesian framework. The origin of the perturbation seen in the unconditional mass fraction in CSE and the impact of a smoothing prior on the recovered solution and credible intervals are discussed. Different regularization methods are studied and it is shown that both zeroth and first order Tikhonov are promising regularization methods for CSE.

In the present work, the non-premixed CSE formulation is extended to include the impact of radiation of the conditional reaction rates and is applied to a semi-industrial furnace. This study demonstrates that a RANS-CSE simulation is able to accurately predict the temperature and species concentration, including NOx, for large scale realistic furnace configurations.

Finally, a multi-stream CSE formulation is developed and applied to the DJHC burners in the RANS and LES framework. This new CSE formulation is able to predict the temperature and velocity profiles in very good agreement with the experimental data. Further, the LES multi-stream CSE formulation is able to predict the time-dependent nature of the DHJC burners.