Session: 04-24 Kinetics I

Paper Number: 124328

124328 - Development of a Virtual Chemistry Reaction Mechanism for H2/CH4 Turbulent Combustion Modelling 

The species transport models are one of the most attractive solutions to capture complex phenomena such as differential diffusion stretch and heat loss on the flame front. One of the biggest drawbacks of these combustion models is the high computational cost that can become prohibitive when higher-order hydrocarbons have to be included in the fuel mixture. The need to reduce the number of species to be transported and the complexity of the reaction mechanism raises the need to develop “ultralight” kinetics schemes.

The concept of virtual chemistry has been recently introduced by Fiorina et al. [1] to improve the prediction of global reaction mechanisms containing the computational cost. In this work, a virtual reaction mechanism has been proposed for the investigation of H2/CH4 mixtures. Since the differential diffusion is expected to play a pivotal role in lean conditions for high H2 content mixtures, the proposed model accounts for the differential diffusion of the fictitious species.

The predictivity of the virtual chemistry model has been validated on a swirl stabilized perfectly premixed turbulent test case. The artificially thickened flame model has been adopted to allow the flame front discretization on an LES grid and to model the turbulence chemistry interaction. The numerical results show a very good agreement with the experimental optical measurements confirming the effectiveness of this approach for predicting the H2/CH4 blend.

[1]        M. Cailler, N. Darabiha, B. Fiorina, Development of a virtual optimized chemistry method. Application to hydrocarbon/air combustion, Combust. Flame. 211 (2020) 281–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.combustflame.2019.09.013.

Presenting Author: simone Castellani Università di Firenze

Presenting Author Biography: I'm a second-year PhD student at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Florence (DIEF). My research topic is turbulent combustion modelling.

Authors:

simone Castellani Università di Firenze
Antonio Andreini Università di Firenze
Roberto Meloni Baker Hughes