Numerical methods for complicated chemical mechanism involved in combustion simulation

Abstract

Numerical simulation is helpful for understanding fundamental combustion processes such as ignition, flame propagation, flame instability, extinction, and turbulence/flame interaction, and for revealing the physical-chemical mechanisms involved in these processes. Therefore, numerical simulation becomes one of the most important research tools for developing alternative fuels and high-performance combustion engines. However, the broad range of temporal and spatial scales and the complicated chemical mechanism bring great challenge for combustion simulation. To achieve efficient and accurate combustion simulation, we need properly handle the stiffness and the large number of equations caused by complicated chemical mechanism. This work introduces the recent progress on this topic. Different methods for chemistry reduction and adaptive chemistry are introduced and these methods can efficiently reduce the number of equations that need to be solved in combustion simulation. Different methods for efficient integration and low-dimension/repro-modeling are introduced to deal with the stiffness induced by complicated chemical mechanism. To efficiently simulate the multi-scale combustion processes, we need develop and use different adaptive techniques for mesh, time-step, chemical mechanism and physical/chemical models.