A hybrid discontinuous spectral element method and filtered mass density function solver for turbulent reacting flows

Abstract

We present a novel hybrid scheme for the large eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent reacting flows. The scheme couples the discontinuous spectral element method (DSEM) solver for the unsteady compressible Navier-Stokes equations with a Monte Carlo particle filtered mass density function (FMDF) solver for the transport of reacting species. The method is capable of high-order simulations on unstructured grids. Mean particle estimate construction mimics the DSEM numerical procedure and utilizes variable basis functions. The scheme is tested on non-reacting and reacting Taylor-Green vortex flows. Studies of varying polynomial order, different basis functions for constructing particle estimates, and varying particle quantities are conducted. We demonstrate that a tent kernel, in conjunction with high polynomial order, produces the most accurate results. The chemically reacting simulations validate the hybrid scheme and demonstrate its applicability across a range of reaction regimes. The hybrid scheme's computational cost is 2.1 times the DSEM-LES solver.

Additional information

Funding

The support for this work was provided by the U.S. Office of Secretary of Defense under contract FA8650-12-C-2247. The authors are also grateful to the Air Force Research Laboratory staff for program management support. Part of the simulation resources for this project was provided by the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research (ACER) group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additional high-performance computing (HPC) resources were provided by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Comet at San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) through allocations TG-TRA180035 and CTS180014.