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Recent implementation of emission control regulations has resulted in a considerable demand from industry to improve the efficiency while minimizing the consumption and pollutant emissions of the next generation of aero-engine combustors. Those phenomena are shown to strongly depend upon the underlying complex chemical pathways and their interaction with turbulence. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is an attractive tool to address those issues with high accuracy at a reasonable computing cost. However, the computation of accurate combustion chemistry remains a challenge. Indeed, combustion proceeds through complex and highly non-linear processes that involve up to hundreds of different chemical compounds, which significantly increases the computational time and often induces stiffness in the resolved equations. As a mean to circumvent these drawbacks while retaining the necessary kinetics for the prediction of pollutants, Analytically Reduced Chemistry (ARC) has recently received high interest in the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) community. ARC is a strategy for the description of combustion chemistry where only the most important species and reactions are retained, in a "physically-oriented way". ARC is on the verge of becoming affordable at a design stage, thanks to the continuously increasing available computational resources. The goal of the present work is twofold. A first objective is to test and validate efficient techniques and tools by which detailed chemistries are reduced to an LES-compliant format. To do so, the multi-step reduction tool YARC is selected and employed to derive and validate a series of ARC specifically designed to retrieve correct flame structures. A second objective is to investigate the overall feasibility and benefits of using ARC, combined to the Thickened Flame model (DTFLES), in performing LES of configurations of increasing complexity. The first configuration is a sooting swirl-stabilized non-premixed aero-engine combustor experimentally studied at DLR, burning ethylene. LES of this configuration is performed with the AVBP solver, in which ARC has been implemented. By comparison with global chemistry and tabulated chemistry, results highlight the importance of accurately capturing the flow-flame interactions for a good prediction of pollutants and soot. The second configuration is a swirled twophase flow burner featuring a lean direct injection system and burning Jet-A2. A novel methodology to real fuel modeling (HyChem approach) is employed, which allows subsequent ARC derivation. The excellent results in comparison with measurements constitute an additional validation of the methodology, and provide valuable qualitative and quantitative insights on the flame-spray interactions and on the pollutant formation (NOx) mechanisms in complex flame configurations. |
