Large eddy simulation of turbulent supersonic hydrogen flames with OpenFOAM

A high-fidelity numerical solver, RYrhoCentralFoam, is developed based on OpenFOAM® to simulate turbulent compressible reactive flows. It is designed for accurately simulating combustion with detailed chemistry, turbulence, shock wave and their interactions. The features that we develop in this work include: (1) multi-species transport, (2) detailed fuel chemistry, and (3) turbulent combustion models in Large Eddy Simulations (LES). Two hydrogen flames with detailed measurements are studied, including turbulent auto-igniting flame in hot co-flowing jet and supersonic combustion in a supersonic burner. For the first flame, the lift-off height, overall flow and flame behaviors, as well as the statistics of the velocity and reactive scalar are computed accurately. For the second flame, the RYrhoCentralFoam is also shown to have the ability for modelling supersonic combustion in model combustors, in terms of the velocity and temperature fields as well as unsteady flame lift-off dynamics in a recirculating zone. The accuracies of LES with RYrhoCentralFOAM in both flames are comparable to those with other well-validated compressible flow solvers.