Plasma modeling of ignition for combustion simulations

Abstract

Detailed ignition modeling has been traditionally left out of the combustion simulations, mainly due to its relatively small time and length scales that could not be integrated into much larger length and time scales of combustion and fluid dynamics. Although the advancements in computing power has now made possible to integrate ignition and combustion modeling, not many researchers have shown interest due to the wide scope of knowledge it needs in both plasma physics and combustion dynamics. In this paper, we are reporting a preliminary analysis of an integrated ignition+combustion model for both spark ignition (SI) and laser-induced spark ignition (LISI) combustion chambers. A common aspect of both SI and LISI is the use of equation-of-state (EOS) tables at temperatures up to 5 times higher than those assumed in most combustion codes. We report use of an atomic physics code to generate EOS tables needed for our combustion and ignition simulations.