An Unstructured Reacting Flow Solver With Coupled Implicit Solution of the Species Conservation Equations

Many reacting flow applications mandate coupled solution of the species conservation equations. A low-memory coupled solver was developed to solve the species transport equations on an unstructured mesh with implicit spatial as well as species-to-species coupling. First, the computational domain was decomposed into sub-domains comprised of geometrically contiguous cells—a process termed internal domain decomposition (IDD). This was done using the binary spatial partitioning (BSP) algorithm. Following this step, for each sub-domain, the discretized equations were developed using the finite-volume method, written in block implicit form, and solved using an iterative solver based on Krylov sub-space iterations, i.e., the Generalized Minimum Residual (GMRES) solver. Overall (outer) iterations were then performed to treat explicitness at sub-domain interfaces and non-linearities in the governing equations. The solver is demonstrated for a laminar ethane-air flame calculation with five species and a single reaction step, and for a catalytic methane-air combustion case with 19 species and 22 reaction steps. It was found that the best performance is manifested for sub-domain size of about 1000 cells, the exact number depending on the problem at hand. The overall gain in computational efficiency was found to be a factor of 2–5 over the block Gauss-Seidel procedure.