| Today's electricity, transportation, and manufacturing all fundamentally rely on the turbulent combustion of fuel. However, modeling the deep complexity inside a realistic turbulent flame is well beyond the capability of today's fastest computers. By studying flame/vortex interactions we can build insights that will illuminate much of the complex interplay of kinetics, fluid dynamics, and heat and mass transfer of turbulent combustion.; For this study, the interaction of a freely-propagating premixed methane-air flame with a two-dimensional counter-rotating vortex pair is simulated under fuel-rich conditions using a detailed C1-C2 chemical mechanism and mixture-averaged Dipole Reduced Formalism (DRFM) transport properties. The effect of the strength and size of the vortex pair on the transient flame response and the evolution of its structure along the centerline of the vortex pair are examined. Additional effects of initial air dilution and/or heating of the vortex pair are also analyzed. Further refinements of the distribution of added air are also postulated in an effort to reconcile previous experimental results observed by Nguyen and Paul (1996) and Najm et al. (1999). Observations of qualitative changes in the response of OH and CH, their source terms, and rate-of-progress variables are presented. |
