Implementation of Detailed Chemistry Mechanisms in Engine Simulations

The stiffness of large chemistry mechanisms has been proved to be a major hurdle towards predictive engine simulations. As a result, detailed chemistry mechanisms with a few thousand species need to be reduced based on target conditions so that they can be accommodated within the available computational resources. The computational cost of simulations typically increase super-linearly with the number of species and reactions. This work aims to bring detailed chemistry mechanisms within the realm of engine simulations by coupling the framework of unsteady flamelets and fast chemistry solvers. A previously developed Tabulated Flamelet Model (TFM) framework for non-premixed combustion was used in this study. The flamelet solver consists of the traditional operator-splitting scheme with VODE (Variable coefficient ODE solver) and a numerical Jacobian for solving the chemistry. In order to use detailed mechanisms with thousands of species, a new framework with the LSODES (Livermore Solver for ODEs in Sparse form) chemistry solver and an analytical Jacobian was implemented in this work. Results from 1D simulations show that with the new framework, the computational cost is linearly proportional to the number of species in a given chemistry mechanism. As a result, the new framework is 2–3 orders of magnitude faster than the conventional VODE solver for large chemistry mechanisms. This new framework was used to generate unsteady flamelet libraries for n-dodecane using a detailed chemistry mechanism with 2,755 species and 11,173 reactions. The Engine Combustion Network (ECN) Spray A experiments which consist of an igniting n-dodecane spray in turbulent, high-pressure engine conditions are simulated using large eddy simulations (LES) coupled with detailed mechanisms. A grid with 0.06 mm minimum cell size and 22 million peak cell count was implemented. The framework is validated across a range of ambient temperatures against ignition delay and liftoff lengths. Qualitative results from the simulations were compared against experimental OH and CH₂O PLIF data. The models are able to capture the spatial and temporal trends in species compared to those observed in the experiments. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons between the predictions of the reduced and detailed mechanisms are presented in detail. The main goal of this study is to demonstrate that detailed reaction mechanisms (∼1000 species) can now be used in engine simulations with a linear increase in computation cost with number of species during the tabulation process and a small increase in the 3D simulation cost.