a b s t r a c tThis paper investigates one issue related to Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of self-excited combustion instabilities in gas-fueled swirled burners: the effects of incomplete mixing between fuel and air at the combustion chamber inlet. Perfect premixing of the gases entering the combustion chamber is rarely achieved in practical applications and this study investigates its impact by comparing LES assuming perfect premixing and LES where the fuel jets are resolved so that fuel/air mixing is explicitely computed. This work demonstrates that the perfect premixing assumption is reasonable for stable flows but is not acceptable to predict self-excited unstable cases. This is shown by comparing LES and experimental fields in terms of mean and RMS fields of temperature, species, velocities as well as mixture fraction pdfs and unsteady activity for two regimes: a stable one at equivalence ratio 0.83 and an unstable one at 0.7. IntroductionThe instabilities of swirled turbulent flows have been the subject of intense research in the last ten years. One important issue has been to identify the possibilities offered by simulation and especially Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to predict self-excited combustion oscillations. The specific example of swirled combustors where flames couple with acoustic modes has received significant attention [1-4] because such oscillations are often found in real gas turbines [5,6]. An important question in swirled unstable flames is the effect of mixing on stability. In most real systems, combustion is not fully premixed and even in laboratories, very few swirled flames are truly fully premixed. The effects of equivalence ratio fluctuations on flame stability in combustors have been known for a long time [7,8]: changes in air inlet velocity induce variations of the flow rate through the flame but may also induce mixing fluctuations and the introduction into the combustion zone of nonconstant equivalence ratio pockets. These pockets create unsteady combustion and can generate instabilities.In many experiments, LES is performed assuming perfect mixing mainly because the computational work is simpler: there is no need to mesh the fuel injection holes or to resolve the zone where these jets mix with air. However, this assumption totally eliminates fluctuations of equivalence ratio as a mechanism of instability, thereby limiting the validity of the LES. One specific example of such limitations is reported in the experiment of [9][10][11] which has been computed by multiple groups [12][13][14][15][16]. This methane/air swirled combustor was especially built to study combustion instabilities in such systems and for all computations up to now, perfect mixing has been assumed by LES experts because methane was injected in the swirler, far upstream of the combustor, suggesting that perfect mixing is achieved before the combustion zone. Interestingly, all computations performed with perfect mixing assumptions have failed to predict the unstable modes observed in the experiments. Moreover, recent...

International audienceA reduced two-step scheme (called 2S KERO BFER) for kerosene-air premixed flames is presented in the context of Large Eddy Simulation of reacting turbulent flows in industrial applications. The chemical mechanism is composed of two re- actions corresponding to the fuel oxidation into CO and H2O, and the CO − CO2 equilibrium. To ensure the validity of the scheme for rich combustion, the pre- exponential constants of the two reactions are tabulated versus the local equiva- lence ratio. The fuel and oxidizer exponents are chosen to guarantee the correct dependence of laminar flame speed with pressure. Due to a lack of experimen- tal results, the detailed mechanism of Dagaut composed of 209 species and 1673 reactions, and the skeletal mechanism of Luche composed of 91 species and 991 reactions have been used to validate the reduced scheme. Computations of one- dimensional laminar flames have been performed with the 2S KERO BFER scheme using the CANTERA and COSILAB softwares for a wide range of pressure ([1;12] atm), fresh gas temperature ([300;700] K), and equivalence ratio ([0.6;2.0]). Results show that the flame speed is correctly predicted for the whole range of parameters, showing a maximum for stoichiometric flames, a decrease for rich combustion and a satisfactory pressure dependence. The burnt gas temperature and the dilution by Exhaust Gas Recirculation are also well reproduced. Moreover, the results for ignition delay time are in good agreement with the experiments

Due to their negative impacts on environment and human health, future regulations on soot emissions are expected to become stricter, in particular by controlling the size of the emitted particles. Therefore, the development of precise and sophisticated models describing the soot production, such as sectional