Large eddy simulation of non-reactive flow in burners

Large eddy simulations of non-reactive Delft II and Sydney bluff body flow are performed using different sub-grid scale models. Simulation of non-reactive burners is useful when studying flow characteristics inside reactive burners. As turbulent combustion simulation is rather an intricate task, it is helpful to study cold air flow inside the combustion chamber before igniting the chamber. In order to study the flow inside the mentioned test cases, different sub-grid scale models, i.e., constant Smagorinsky, dynamic Smagorinsky and dynamic WALE model are used to model the unresolved small scales. For the numerical simulations, a finite volume in-house code is used. The code adopts the projection method to solve the fluid flow equations. A second-order accurate scheme is used for spatial discretization. The time integration is done using a second-order accurate predictor-corrector scheme. For solving the resultant pressure Poisson equation, TDMA (Tridiagonal Matrix Algorithm) is used with multi-grid convergence acceleration. Generally, the results show good agreement with available experimental data. As expected, the dynamic WALE model performs better than the other models. To further improve the results, a rather realistic type of velocity inlet boundary conditions are applied to Sydney bluff body flow, i.e., digital filter velocity inflow boundary conditions. The results show drastic improvement using digital filter inflow, which is mainly due to the turbulent nature of the flow field. © 2021 The author(s).