Diffusive-thermal instabilities of a planar premixed flame aligned with a shear flow

Abstract

The stability of a thick planar premixed flame, propagating steadily in a direction transverse to that of unidirectional shear flow, is studied. A linear stability analysis is carried out in the asymptotic limit of infinitely large activation energy, yielding a dispersion relation. The relation characterises the coupling between Taylor dispersion (or shear-enhanced diffusion) and the flame thermo-diffusive instabilities, in terms of two main parameters, namely, the reactant Lewis number (Formula presented.) and the flow Peclet number (Formula presented.). The implications of the dispersion relation are discussed and various flame instabilities are identified and classified in the (Formula presented.) - (Formula presented.) plane. An important original finding is the demonstration that for values of the Peclet number exceeding a critical value, the classical cellular instability, commonly found for (Formula presented.), exists now for (Formula presented.) but is absent when (Formula presented.). In fact, the cellular instability identified for (Formula presented.) is shown to occur either through a finite-wavelength stationary bifurcation (also known as type-I (Formula presented.)) or through a longwave stationary bifurcation (also known as type-II (Formula presented.)). The latter type-II (Formula presented.) bifurcation leads in the weakly nonlinear regime to a Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, which is determined. As for the oscillatory instability, usually encountered in the absence of Taylor dispersion in (Formula presented.) mixtures, it is found to be absent if the Peclet number is large enough. The stability findings, which follow from the dispersion relation derived analytically, are complemented and examined numerically for a finite value of the Zeldovich number. The numerical study involves both computations of the eigenvalues of a linear stability boundary-value problem and numerical simulations of the time-dependent governing partial differential equations. The computations are found to be in good qualitative agreement with the analytical predictions.