Numerical Implementation and validation of turbulent premixed combustion model for lean mixtures

The present paper discusses the numerical investigation of turbulent premixed flames under lean conditions. Lean premixed combustion, a low NOx emission technique but are prone to instabilities, extinction and blow out. Such flames are influenced by preferential diffusion due to different mass diffusivities of reactants and difference between heat and mass diffusivities in the reaction zone. In this numerical study, we estimate non-reacting flow characteristics with implementation of an Algebraic Flame Surface Wrinkling Model (AFSW) in the open source CFD code OpenFOAM. In these flows, the mean velocity fields and recirculation zones were captured reasonably well by the RANS standard k-epsilon turbulence model. The simulated turbulent velocity is in good agreement with experiments in the shear-generated turbulence layer. The reacting flow study was done at three equivalence ratios of 0.43, 0.5 and 0.56 to gauge the ability of numerical model to predict combustion quantities. At equivalence ratios 0.5 and 0.56 the simulations showed numerical oscillations and non-convergence of the turbulent quantities. This leads to a detailed parametric variation study where, the pre-constant of AFSW model is varied with values 0.3, 0.35 and 0.4. However the study revealed the weak dependence of pre-constant value on the equivalence ratio. Hence the pre-constant value is fit for specific equivalence ratio based on the parametric variation study. The tuned AFSW model with fitted pre-constant specific to given equivalence ratio predicted are compared with experiments and discussed. The tuned AFSW model produced turbulent flame speed values which are good agreement with experiments.