Daniele Farrace

Influence of turbulence-chemistry interaction for n-heptane spray combustion under diesel engine conditions with emphasis on soot formation and oxidation

The influence of the turbulence–chemistry interaction (TCI) for n-heptane sprays under diesel engine conditions has been investigated by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The conditional moment closure approach, which has been previously validated thoroughly for such flows, and the homogeneous reactor (i.e. no turbulent combustion model) approach have been compared, in view of the recent resurgence of the latter approaches for diesel engine CFD. Experimental data available from a constant-volume combustion chamber have been used for model validation purposes for a broad range of conditions including variations in ambient oxygen (8‑21% by vol.), ambient temperature (900 and 1000 K) and ambient density (14.8 and 30 kg/m3). The results from both numerical approaches have been compared to the experimental values of ignition delay (ID), flame lift-off length (LOL), and soot volume fraction distributions. TCI was found to have a weak influence on ignition delay for the conditions simulated, attributed to the low values of the scalar dissipation relative to the critical value above which auto-ignition does not occur. In contrast, the flame LOL was considerably affected, in particular at low oxygen concentrations. Quasi-steady soot formation was similar; however, pronounced differences in soot oxidation behaviour are reported. The differences were further emphasised for a case with short injection duration: in such conditions, TCI was found to play a major role concerning the soot oxidation behaviour because of the importance of soot-oxidiser structure in mixture fraction space. Neglecting TCI leads to a strong over-estimation of soot oxidation after the end of injection. The results suggest that for some engines, and for some phenomena, the neglect of turbulent fluctuations may lead to predictions of acceptable engineering accuracy, but that a proper turbulent combustion model is needed for more reliable results.

Predicting In-Cylinder Soot in a Heavy-Duty Diesel Engine for Variations in SOI and TDC Temperature Using the Conditional Moment Closure Model

Numerical simulations of in-cylinder soot evolution in the optically accessible heavy-duty diesel engine of Sandia National Laboratories have been performed with the multidimensional conditional moment closure (CMC) model using a reduced n-heptane chemical mechanism coupled with a two-equation soot model. Simulation results are compared to the high-fidelity experimental data by means of pressure traces, apparent heat release rate (AHRR) and time-resolved in-cylinder soot mass derived from optical soot luminosity and multiple wavelength pyrometry in conjunction with high speed soot cloud imaging. In addition, spatial distributions of soot relevant quantities are given for several operating conditions.

A Progress Review on Soot Experiments and Modeling in the Engine Combustion Network (ECN)

The following individuals and funding agencies are acknowledged for their support. The authors from DTU acknowledge the Technical University of Denmark, Danish Strategic Research Council, and MAN Diesel & Turbo University of Wisconsin: Financial support provided by the Princeton Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center. ETH Zurich: Financial support from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (grant no. SI/500818-01) and the Swiss Competence Center for Energy and Mobility (CCEM project “In-cylinder emission reduction”) is gratefully acknowledged. Argonne National Labs: Work was funded by U.S. DOE Office of Vehicle Technologies, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. We also gratefully acknowledge the computing resources provided on Fusion, a computing cluster operated by the Laboratory Computing Resource Center at Argonne National Laboratory. Sandia National Labs, Combustion Research Facility: Work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Vehicle Technologies. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DEAC04-94AL85000. Chris Carlen and Dave Cicone are gratefully acknowledged for technical assistance. The authors from ANL and SNL also wish to thank Gurpreet Singh and Leo Breton, program managers at U.S. DOE, for their support.

A LES-CMC formulation for premixed flames including differential diffusion

A finite volume large eddy simulation–conditional moment closure (LES-CMC) numerical framework for premixed combustion developed in a previous studyhas been extended to account for differential diffusion. The non-unity Lewis number CMC transport equation has an additional convective term in sample space proportional to the conditional diffusion of the progress variable, that in turn accounts for diffusion normal to the flame front and curvature-induced effects. Planar laminar simulations are first performed using a spatially homogeneous non-unity Lewis number CMC formulation and validated against physical-space fully resolved reference solutions. The same CMC formulation is subsequently used to numerically investigate the effects of curvature for laminar flames having different effective Lewis numbers: a lean methane–air flame with Leeff = 0.99 and a lean hydrogen–air flame with Leeff = 0.33. Results suggest that curvature does not affect the conditional heat release if the effective Lewis number tends to unity, so that curvature-induced transport may be neglected. Finally, the effect of turbulence on the flame structure is qualitatively analysed using LES-CMC simulations with and without differential diffusion for a turbulent premixed bluff body methane–air flame exhibiting local extinction behaviour. Overall, both the unity and the non-unity computations predict the characteristic M-shaped flame observed experimentally, although some minor differences are identified. The findings suggest that for the high Karlovitz number (from 1 to 10) flame considered, turbulent mixing within the flame weakens the differential transport contribution by reducing the conditional scalar dissipation rate and accordingly the conditional diffusion of the progress variable.