Numerical simulations of supersonic combustion of methane-hydrogen fuel in an experimental combustion chamber

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the numerical simulations of supersonic combustion of methane-hydrogen fuel in an experimental combustion chamber that has been performed using a parallelized version of the computer code MSD (ONERA) installed on a PC cluster. The non-equilibrium chemistry was modeled by a reduced kinetic mechanism (LCSR). The MSD code performance has been assessed for various problems and hardware configurations. Results of two-dimensional simulations are presented demonstrating the behavior of the fuel mixture in a burning supersonic jet. In the case of supersonic combustion, chemical kinetics plays an important role because of high flow speeds about 1500 m/s and moderate temperatures in the fuel-air mixing layer. An accurate modeling of the ignition delay is necessary under such conditions. Since the use of comprehensive kinetic mechanisms is prohibitive for multidimensional computations, a reduced mechanism must be accepted as a chemical model. The aim of this chapter is to present an example of supersonic combustion simulation on a PC cluster. One part of the chapter addresses the performance of a parallelized computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code on a PC cluster depending on the computational job and hardware configurations. Another part presents some new results on the combustion process of a CH4-H2 jet in a supersonic flow.