Assessment of dynamic adaptive chemistry with tabulated reactions for the simulation of unsteady multiregime combustion phenomena

Abstract

Solving chemistry is an integral part of reacting flow simulations, usually dominating the computational cost. Among the different strategies to accelerate the solution of chemistry and to achieve realizable simulations, the use of Dynamic Adaptive Chemistry (DAC) stands out among other methods. DAC methods are based on the use of reduced mechanisms generated from local conditions. The reduction process is computationally expensive and strategies for reducing the frequency of reduction and the re-utilization of the generated reduced mechanisms are key in making DAC methods computationally affordable. In this study, a new method hereby referred as Tabulated Reactions for Adaptive Chemistry (TRAC) is proposed to correlate chemical states with their reduced mechanisms in order to reduce both the frequency of reduction and to allow for re-utilization of reduced chemical schemes. TRAC introduces a mechanism tabulation strategy based on the use of a low-dimensional space that defines the thermo-chemical conditions for which specific reduced reaction mechanisms are stored. Chemistry reduction is achieved by the use of Path Flux Analysis (PFA) with a reaction rate-sensitivity method to achieve further reduction in the reaction mechanisms. The new TRAC proposal is applied to various canonical transient problems and the results are compared with reference solutions obtained from detailed chemistry calculations. A speedup of about 4x was achieved with TRAC while maintaining an error under 3% in the prediction of the major and minor species, flame structure, and flame propagation.