Soot Production and Thermal Radiation from Turbulent Jet Diffusion Flames

The aim of this study is to advance the present capability for modelling soot production and thermal radiation from turbulent jet diffusion flames. Turbulent methane / air jet diffusion flames at atmospheric and elevated pressure are studied experimentally to provide data for subsequent model development and validation. Methane is only lightly sooting at atmospheric pressure whereas at elevated pressure the soot yield increases greatly. This allows the creation of an optically thick, highly radiating flame within a laboratory scale rig. Essential flame properties needed for model validation are measured at 1 and 3 atm. These are mean mixture fraction, mean temperature, mean soot volume fraction, and mean and instantaneous spectrally resolved radiation intensity. These two flames are modelled using the parabolic CFD code GENMIX. The combustion / turbulence interaction is modelled using the conserved scalar / laminar flamelet approach. The chemistry of methane combustion is modelled using a detailed chemistry laminar flame code. The combustion model accommodates the non-adiabatic nature of the flames through the use of multiple flamelets for each scalar. The flamelets are differentiated by the amount of radiative heat loss that is included. Flamelet selection is carried out through the solution of a balance equation for enthalpy, which includes a source term for the radiative heat loss. A new soot model has been developed and calibrated by application to a laminar flame calculation. Within the turbulent flame calculations the soot production is fully coupled to the radiative loss. This is achieved through the use of multiple flamelets for the soot source terms and the inclusion of the radiative loss from the soot (as well as the gases) in the enthalpy source. Spectral radiative emission from the flames has been modelled using the RADCAL code. Mean flame properties from the GENMIX calculations are used as an input to RADCAL