On the Modeling of Transient Combustion and Heat Transfer Characteristics in Furnaces

This paper describes a numerical method that was designed to calculate and predict the flow characteristics in three-dimensional furnace configurations at high Reynolds numbers under steady and unsteady conditions. The paper introduces a new (non-commercial) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program (3DTCOMB) that is capable of adequately predicting the furnaces. The time dependent nature of the flame propagation in furnaces is described and explained in the present work through a “squashing and stretching” process. The agreements between the obtained numerical predictions, based on the Arrhenius reaction model and the corresponding experimental results are shown to be qualitative in nature. The computed flame characteristics at various time intervals are to be used for future development of the combustion models on a large-scale furnace.