Flamelet/transported PDF simulations of ethylene/air jet turbulent non-premixed flame using a three-equation PAH-based soot production model

This article reports flamelet/transported PDF (TPDF) simulations of the well-documented ethylene/air turbulent non-premixed jet flame investigated experimentally at Sandia. The transported PDF equation is solved with the Stochastic Eulerian Field method. The soot production is modelled by a validated three equation PAH-based soot model that predicts the mean soot aggregate properties at low computational time and includes a detailed description of the soot production processes. Gas and soot radiation is modelled using the rank-correlated full-spectrum k model. The turbulence/chemistry/soot production/radiation interactions are taken into account by means of the PDF method. Simulations are run by considering or not soot differential mixing. Based on recent conclusions drawn from Direct Numerical Simulations (Zhou et al., Proc. Combsut. Inst. 38 (2021) 2731–2739), soot differential mixing is modelled by neglecting soot mixing owing to sufficiently large mixing timescales. When soot differential mixing is considered, model predictions reproduce reasonably well the exhaustive set of experimental data, including flame structure, soot statistics and radiative outputs without adjusting parameters. In particular, the predictions demonstrate for the first time the capability of RANS/TPDF models to capture the soot intermittency. On the other hand, neglecting the soot differential mixing produces notable reductions in mean and fluctuating soot volume fraction and soot intermittency. Scatter plot analysis shows that the effects of soot differential mixing are more pronounced in regions of the mixture fraction space where soot surface growth and soot oxidation dominate the soot production, affecting these processes in a non-negligible manner. In an opposite way, soot nucleation and PAH condensation are much less significantly affected. Model results show also that disregarding soot differential mixing reduces the mean soot emission as well the soot emission turbulence/radiation interaction.