Toward computationally efficient combustion DNS with complex fuels via principal component transport

We investigate the potential of accelerating chemistry integration during the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of complex fuels based on the transport equations of representative scalars that span the desired composition space using principal component analysis (PCA). The transport of principal components (PCs) can reduce the number of transported scalars and improve the spatial and temporal resolution requirements. The strategy is demonstrated using DNS of a premixed methane-air flame in a 2D vortical flow and is extended to the 3D geometry to demonstrate the resulting enhancement in the computational efficiency of PC transport. The PCs are derived from a priori PCA of the same composition space using DNS. This analysis is used to construct and tabulate the PCs' chemical source terms in terms of the PCs using artificial neural networks (ANN). Comparison of DNS based on a full thermo-chemical state and DNS based on PC transport with six PCs shows excellent agreement even for terms that are not included in the PCA reduction. The transported PCs reproduce some of the salient features of strongly curved and strongly strained flames. The results also show a significant reduction of two orders of magnitude in the computational cost of the simulations, which enables an extension of the solution approach to 3D DNS under similar computational requirements.