Prediction of a Swirl-Stabilized CH4/H2 Flame Structure Using Conditional Moment Closure Coupled with OpenFOAM

A numerical study was performed to explicate the structure of non-premixed swirl-stabilized CH4/H2 flames. Swirl-stabilized flames involve a highly complex interaction between turbulence and chemistry that leads to another level of difficulty in modeling. In such cases, the large eddy simulation with a conditional moment closure (CMC) would be a promising tool. However, to achieve results with minimal computational effort without compromising on accuracy, the Reynolds stress model (RSM) with CMC was used in this study. The OpenFOAM-based CMC solver (cmcFoam) earlier proposed by us (Gaikwad and Sreedhara, 2019) was employed to achieve an optimized coupling between RSM and CMC. Three-dimensional (3D) simulations were performed using a transient compressible RSM with the detailed chemical kinetic mechanism, GRI-Mech 3.0, involving 36 species and 219 chemical reactions (excluding NOx chemistry). Results predicted by RSM were compared with the measured data. A good agreement between predicted results and the m...