Turbulent Premixed Flames
Many technical devices, ranging from gas-turbines for electricity production to internal combustion engines for automotive applications, rely on turbulent premixed combustion. At the ITV, we perform large scale numerical simulations on the fastest supercomputers in the world to analyze the intricate synergies between turbulence and combustion.The simulations are performed on massively parallel computers with more that 100.000 processors, employing hundreds of billions numerical degrees of freedom, and generating hundreds of terabytes of data. We focus on the scaling of fundamental quantities such as the flame burning rate with respect to basic fluid dynamics parameters such as the Reynolds number. We also investigate the pollutant formation in these system in order to develop strategies for a significant reduction and the development of green device for energy production.
Visualization of the vorticity fields (grey-scale) and flame surface (red) in a turbulent premixed flame