Direct numerical simulation of soot formation in jet-engine combustors

• Main Authors: G. Bansal, M. E. Mueller, H. Pitsch
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; black carbon; Global warming
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.169.9938; http://ctr.stanford.edu/ResBriefs09/17_bansal.pdf

Soot particles are considered to be an important public hazard as they can cause various respiratory and health problems. Studies have also linked soot particles to global warming as they remain airborne for weeks and often settle on glaciers in arctic regions, and black carbon strongly absorbs heat. Soot is formed in the rich hydrocarbon combustion zones in many combustion devices: internal combustion engines, jet-engine combustors, industrial burners, etc. Therefore, it is imperative to develop predictive computational models of soot formation in combustion devices which can then lead to optimal design of these systems. Detailed modeling of soot in a combustor is an enormous task as it contains various multi-physics ingredients: turbulence, gas-phase chemical reactions, and soot particle growth and destruction through various physical and heterogenous chemical mechanisms. Furthermore, all of these processes are non-linearly coupled to each other. The broad goal of this work is to conduct a direct numerical simulation of soot formation in threedimensional jet-engine combustor resolving all the length and time scales of turbulence and gas-phase chemical reactions directly. Soot population will be represented by a stateof-the-art