https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01878-4
Regular Article
Numerical investigation of piloted CH4/air flame using tabulated chemistry and reactor-based approaches
School of Mechanical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Goa, 403401, Ponda, Goa, India
a
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Received:
17
May
2025
Accepted:
23
August
2025
Published online:
2
September
2025
Abstract
This study investigated the turbulent piloted methane/air flame using two distinct classes of combustion models, i.e., the flamelet progress variable (FPV) and partially stirred reactor (PaSR) models. The FPV model precomputes reactive scalars and stores the data in tabulated form, and the mean reactive scalars were obtained by averaging the flamelet profiles with presumed probability density functions. On the contrary, the reactor-based approach, i.e. the PaSR model, accounts for the turbulence and chemistry interactions by the ratio of chemical and mixing time scales. A dynamic approach to estimating the mixing time scale was introduced by solving additional transport equations for the scalars and scalar variance. Three different dynamic PaSR (d-PaSR) models, with different modelling constants, were investigated in the present study. The modelling was performed using the OpenFOAM flow solver, and the performance of the FPV and d-PaSR models was evaluated in the prediction of flame structures. The Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) approach was used for turbulence modelling. Initially, three different variants of the k-ε turbulence model were tested, with the re-normalisation group (RNG) k-ε model providing superior predictions of the flame structure. Noticeable differences were observed in the prediction of mixture fraction variance among the three d-PaSR models. Both FPV and d-PaSR models captured the qualitative trend of flame structure. However, FPV outperformed the d-PaSR models, with the latter exhibiting overpredictions of reactive scalars. The d-PaSR model was also found to be computationally expensive as compared to the FPV model.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01878-4.
Copyright comment Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
