Assessment of the reactingFoam Solver in Simulating the Hydrogen-Methane Bluff-Body-Stabilized Turbulent Diffusion Flame of the University of Sydney

Turbulent diffusion (non-premixed) flames are commonly found in industrial burners, such as burners used in boilers and combustion furnaces. Bluff-body burners are one of three methods to stabilize turbulent diffusion (non-premixed) flames, where the separation wall between the core fuel jet stream and the surrounding oxidizer coflow stream serves as a flame holder. The flow solver “reactingFoam” of the open-source OpenFOAM software for control-volume-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling offers the capability of simulating reacting flows as encountered in turbulent diffusion flames. In the current study, we assess qualitatively and quantitatively the ability of this CFD solver for treating the reacting flow problem of a popular benchmarking bluff-body stabilized flame, that is, the HM1 flame. This HM1 turbulent non-premixed flame (TNF) has a fuel stream composed of 50% hydrogen (H2) and 50% methane (CH4) by mole. This fuel stream is surrounded by a coflow of oxidizing air jet. The acronym (HM) stands for “Hydrogen-Methane”. This flame was studied experimentally (experiment B4F3) at the University of Sydney (in the New South Wales state, Australia) using different techniques, such as laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV), Rayleigh scattering, and laser-induced fluorescence (LIF). A measurement dataset of flow and chemical fields was compiled and made available freely for validating relevant computational models. We simulate the HM1 flame using the reactingFoam solver and report here various comparisons between the simulation results and the experimental results to aid in judging the feasibility of this open-source CFD solver. Overall, we notice good agreement with the experimental data in terms of resolved profiles of the axial velocity, mass fractions, and temperature. This study, and the presented details about the reactingFoam solver and its implementation, can be viewed as a good case study in CFD modeling of reacting flows. In addition, the information we provide about the measurement dataset, the emphasized recirculation zone, the entrainment phenomena, and the irregularity in the radial velocity can help other researchers who may use the same HM1 data.