Advanced numerical simulation of hydrogen/air turbulent non-premixed flame on model burner

A numerical investigation of hydrogen (H2)/air turbulent non-premixed flame on the model burner was conducted. A large eddy simulation of reacting flow with partial and detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms was employed to obtain a high-resolution and accurate prediction of thermochemical states inside the combustion chamber, including pollutant NO, which have not been adequately predicted until now. This study employed temperature and species mass fraction data from two combustion cases of fully developed turbulent and transition regimes with a fuel composition of 50 % H2 and 50 % N2, experimentally measured by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and TU Darmstadt. A reactor-based partially-stirred reactor (PaSR) model was used to handle the turbulence chemistry interaction. The employed chemical mechanisms included GRI-Mech 3.0 and partial Mevel mechanism. The effects of chemical mechanism and inlet jet velocity on simulation accuracy were discussed. The more elaborative nitrogen reactions in GRI-Mech 3.0 result in a better NO prediction compared to the partial Mevel mechanism. The implementation of finite rate chemistry in a PaSR model yields a significantly improved prediction of NO from the flamelet probability density function approach with less than 1 % root mean square deviation from experimental data. The performed simulation successfully captured the thermochemical profile of a fully developed turbulent flame; however, further improvement on boundary condition modeling is still required for a flame undergoing a transition from laminar to turbulent regimes. Finally, using the partial Mevel mechanism leads to a computational cost reduction of 32.66 % compared to the GRI-Mech 3.0 mechanism, which confirms the proportional relation between the size of the mechanism and computational cost.