Abstract
The effects of fuel composition, thermal stratification, and turbulence on the ignition of lean homogeneous primary reference fuel (PRF)/air mixtures under the conditions of constant volume and elevated pressure are investigated by direct numerical simulations (DNSs) with a new 116-species reduced kinetic mechanism. Two-dimensional DNSs were performed in a fixed volume with a two-dimensional isotropic velocity spectrum and temperature fluctuations superimposed on the initial scalar fields with different fuel compositions to elucidate the influence of variations in the initial temperature fluctuation and turbulence intensity on the ignition of three different lean PRF/air mixtures. In general, it was found that the mean heat release rate increases slowly and the overall combustion occurs fast with increasing thermal stratification regardless of the fuel composition under elevated pressure and temperature conditions. In addition, the effect of the fuel composition on the ignition characteristics of PRF/air mixtures was found to vanish with increasing thermal stratification. Chemical explosive mode (CEM), displacement speed, and Damköhler number analyses revealed that the high degree of thermal stratification induces deflagration rather than spontaneous ignition at the reaction fronts, rendering the mean heat release rate more distributed over time subsequent to thermal runaway occurring at the highest temperature regions in the domain. These analyses also revealed that the vanishing of the fuel effect under the high degree of thermal stratification is caused by the nearly identical propagation characteristics of deflagrations of different PRF/air mixtures. It was also found that high intensity and short-timescale turbulence can effectively homogenize mixtures such that the overall ignition is apt to occur by spontaneous ignition. These results suggest that large thermal stratification leads to smooth operation of homogeneous charge compression-ignition (HCCI) engines regardless of the PRF composition. © 2013 The Combustion Institute.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2038-2047 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Combustion and Flame |
| Volume | 160 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2013 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: The work at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (No. 2011-0008201) and the Human Resources Development of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Korean government, Ministry of Knowledge Economy (No. 2011-4030200010). The work at University of Connecticut was supported by the Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, US Department of Energy under Grant DE-SC0008622. SHC was supported by Saudi Aramco FUELCOM program. This research used resources of the Supercomputing Laboratory at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Prof. F. Bisetti at KAUST and Ms. R. Shan at University of Connecticut in this project.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Energy Engineering and Power Technology
- General Physics and Astronomy
- General Chemical Engineering
- General Chemistry
- Fuel Technology