Position details

Development of an analytical kinetic scheme for kerosene-air combustion
Training › Computational Fluid Dynamics - Combustion

Required Education / Niveau requis

Master or Engineering school

From / Date de début

February/April 2013

Duration / Durée

6 months

Context / Contexte

To decrease fuel consumption and pollutant emissions, the conception of new aeronautical combustion chambers requires a more and more accurate prediction of burnt gas temperature, flame dynamics and pollutants. Large Eddy Simulation has recently proven its capacity to bring new insights in such complex configurations for two main reasons: first, this approach gives access to unsteady turbulent combustion phenomena; second, it gains advantage from the constant increase in computing power.

Still, one difficulty is to accurately describe the chemical process of fuel-air combustion, which requires complex schemes computationally unaffordable in a realistic combustion chamber. Two main approaches have been used to solve this problem, reduced kinetic schemes (typically 1 or 2 reactions) or tabulation methods (collection of flamelets). Both have however disadvantages. Whereas reduced schemes fail predicting pollutants, tabulated chemistry is more difficult to handle in complex geometries where heat losses, evaporation of fuel droplets, etc. must be taken into account. An alternative consists in using analytical kinetic schemes of intermediate complexity which are developed basing on a sensibility analysis of the chemical system in order to identify the most important reactions.

Description / Description

This training follows a recent PhD work (B. Franzelli, INPT, 2011) which showed the capacity of analytic schemes to reproduce methane-air flame characteristics in a complex geometry. The purpose of the proposed work is to build an analytical kinetic scheme for kerosene-air flames for which, contrary to methane, no analytical mechanism exists. This mecanism will be then validated against detailed schemes in academic configurations representative of industrial combustion chambers (homogeneous reactor, one-dimensional freely propagating flame, one-dimensional strained flame, etc.)

The main steps of the work are:

- Bibliography study on analytical scheme construction for methane-air flames

-  Learning the kinetic code CANTERA

- Development and implementation of an analytical scheme for kerosene-air flames

- Validation by comparison with complex schemes in academic configurations.

Contacts / Contacts

Name: Riber Eleonore
Phone: 05 61 19 31 15
Fax: 05 61 19 30 00
Email: riber@cerfacs.fr

Name: Cuenot Bénédicte
Phone: 05 61 19 30 44
Fax: 05 61 19 30 00
Email: cuenot@cerfacs.fr

Salary / Rémunération

580 Euros/month