Impact of Turbulence Intensity and Equivalence Ratio on the Burning Rate of Premixed Methane–Air Flames

Abstract: Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) have been conducted to study the response of initially laminar spherical premixed methane–air flame kernels to successively higher turbulence intensities at five different equivalence ratios. The numerical experiments include a 16-species/25-step skeletal mechanism for methane oxidation and a multicomponent molecular transport model. Highly turbulent conditions (with integral Reynolds numbers up to 4513) have been accessed. The effect of turbulence on the physical properties of the flame, in particular its consumption speed S_c, which is an interesting measure of the turbulent flame speed S_T has been investigated. Local quenching events are increasingly observed for highly turbulent conditions, particularly for lean mixtures. The obtained results qualitatively confirm the expected trend regarding correlations between u′/S_L and the consumption speed: S_c first increases, roughly linearly, with u′/S_L (low turbulence zone), then levels off (bending zone) before decreasing again (quenching limit) for too intense turbulence. For a fixed value of u′/S_L, S_c/S_L varies with the mixture equivalence ratio, showing that additional parameters should probably enter phenomenological expressions relating these two quantities.