Spray Flamelet Modeling of Turbulent Two-Phase Reacting Flows with Multi-Component Fuel in a Lean Direct Injection Combustor

Abstract

Towards the numerical evaluation of the performance in aero-engine combustors, implementing detailed reaction kinetics into the large eddy simulation (LES) cost-effectively is highly desirable. In this work, a newly-developed spray flamelet model is combined with a four-component jet fuel surrogate model to allow integration of the detailed kinetics in the open-source CFD code. The spray flamelet approach (SFGM) can take into account the non-adiabatic effect caused by the evaporating spray and can directly reflect the preferential evaporation, as well as multiple combustion regimes present in complex spray combustion systems. The coupling of the SFGM-LES approach is assessed by comparison with the experimental data from a Lean Direct Injection (LDI) combustor, where the real aviation kerosene, Jet-A, was utilized. The SFGM-LES approach well predicts the experimental statistics in both gas and liquid phases. It is capable of capturing the rich physics and complex flame structures, including the preferential evaporation effect and the multi-regime combustion phenomenon. The present work demonstrates that the complex nature of multi-components and the multiple-combustion regimes in the two-phase combustion can be directly included in the spray flamelet approach, and thus this model can provide new insights into the turbulent spray combustion phenomena.