Modelling nongrey gas-phase and soot radiation in luminous turbulent nonpremixed jet flames

Much progress has been made in radiative heat transfer modelling with respect to the treatment of nongrey radiation from both gas-phase species and soot particles, while radiation modelling in turbulent flame simulations is still in its infancy. Aiming at reducing this gap, this paper introduces state-of-the-art models of gas-phase and soot radiation to turbulent flame simulations. The full-spectrum k-distribution method (M.F. Modest, 2003, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 76, 69–83) is implemented into a three-dimensional unstructured computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for nongrey radiation modelling. The mixture full-spectrum k-distributions including nongrey absorbing soot particles are constructed from a narrow-band k-distribution database created for individual gas-phase species, and an efficient scheme is employed for their construction in CFD simulations. A detailed reaction mechanism including NO _x and soot kinetics is used to predict flame structure, and a detailed soot model using a method of moments is employed to determine soot particle size distributions. A spherical harmonic P₁ approximation is invoked to solve the radiative transfer equation. An oxygen-enriched, turbulent, nonpremixed jet flame is simulated, which features large concentrations of gas-phase radiating species and soot particles. Nongrey soot modelling is shown to be of greater importance than nongrey gas modelling in sooty flame simulations, with grey soot models producing large errors. The nongrey treatment of soot strongly influences flame temperatures in the upstream and the flame-tip region and is essential for accurate predictions of NO. The nongrey treatment of gases, however, weakly influences upstream flame temperatures and, therefore, has only a small effect on NO predictions. The effect of nongrey soot radiation on flame temperature is also substantial in downstream regions where the soot concentration is small. Limitations of the P₁ approximation are discussed for the jet flame configuration; the P₁ approximation yields large errors in the spatial distribution of the computed radiative heat flux for highly anisotropic radiation fields such as those in flames with localized, near-opaque soot regions.

Acknowledgements

This research was sponsored by National Science Foundation under Grant Number CTS-0121573 and by the GM R&D Center.