Browsing by Subject "DQMOM"
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Item Experimental and computational characterization of strong vent flow enclosure fires(2011-08) Weinschenk, Craig George; Ezekoye, Ofodike A.; da Silva, Alexandre K.; Engelhardt, Michael D.; Howell, John R.; Raman, Venkatramanan; Nicks, RobertFirefighters often arrive at structures in which the state of fire progression can be described as ventilation-controlled or under-ventilated. This means that inside the enclosure the pyrolyzed fuel has consumed most, if not all of the available oxygen, resulting in incomplete combustion. Under-ventilated (fuel rich) combustion is particularly dangerous to occupants because of the high yield of toxins such as carbon monoxide and to firefighters because once firefighters enter the structure and introduce oxidizer, the environment can rapidly change into a very dangerous, fast burning condition. The fuel load in many compartment fires would support a several megawatt fire if the fire were not ventilation controlled. In the process of making entrance to the fire compartment, firefighters will likely provide additional ventilation paths for the fire and may initiate firefighting tactics like positive pressure ventilation to push the hot flammable combustion products out of the attack pathway. Forced ventilation creates a strongly mixed flow within the fire compartment. Ventilation creates a complex fluid mechanics and combustion environment that is generally not analyzed on the scale of compartment fires. To better understand the complex coupling of these phenomena, compartment scale non-reacting and reacting experiments were conducted. The experiments, which were conducted at The University of Texas at Austin’s fire research facility, were designed to gain insight into the effects of ventilation on compartment thermal characteristics. Computational models (low and high order) were used to augment the non-reacting and reacting experimental results. Though computationally expensive, computational fluid dynamics models provided significant detail into the coupling of buoyantly driven fire products with externally applied wind or fan flow. A partially stirred reactor model was used to describe strongly driven fire compartment combustion processes because previously there was not an appropriate low dimensional computational tool applicable to this type of problem. This dissertation will focus on the experimental and computational characterization of strong vent flows on single room enclosure fires.Item Large-eddy simulations of scramjet engines(2011-05) Koo, Heeseok; Raman, Venkat; Varghese, Philip L.; Clemens, Noel T.; Moser, Robert D.; Ezekoye, Ofodike A.The main objective of this dissertation is to develop large-eddy simulation (LES) based computational tools for supersonic inlet and combustor design. In the recent past, LES methodology has emerged as a viable tool for modeling turbulent combustion. LES computes the large scale mixing process accurately, thereby providing a better starting point for small-scale models that describe the combustion process. In fact, combustion models developed in the context of Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations exhibit better predictive capability when used in the LES framework. The development of a predictive computational tool based on LES will provide a significant boost to the design of scramjet engines. Although LES has been used widely in the simulation of subsonic turbulent flows, its application to high-speed flows has been hampered by a variety of modeling and numerical issues. In this work, we develop a comprehensive LES methodology for supersonic flows, focusing on the simulation of scramjet engine components. This work is divided into three sections. First, a robust compressible flow solver for a generalized high-speed flow configuration is developed. By using carefully designed numerical schemes, dissipative errors associated with discretization methods for high-speed flows are minimized. Multiblock and immersed boundary method are used to handle scramjet-specific geometries. Second, a new combustion model for compressible reactive flows is developed. Subsonic combustion models are not directly applicable in high-speed flows due to the coupling between the energy and velocity fields. Here, a probability density function (PDF) approach is developed for high-speed combustion. This method requires solution to a high dimensional PDF transport equation, which is achieved through a novel direct quadrature method of moments (DQMOM). The combustion model is validated using experiments on supersonic reacting flows. Finally, the LES methodology is used to study the inlet-isolator component of a dual-mode scramjet. The isolator is a critical component that maintains the compression shock structures required for stable combustor operation in ramjet mode. We simulate unsteady dynamics inside an experimental isolator, including the propagation of an unstart event that leads to loss of compression. Using a suite of simulations, the sensitivity of the results to LES models and numerical implementation is studied.