Influences of flame-vortex interactions on formation of oxides of nitrogen in curved methane-air diffusion flamelets

Previous work has identified a parabolic flamelet in a uniform flow as a useful model for studying flame-vortex interactions and has presented an asymptotic analysis of this flamelet structure for two-step reduced chemistry of the methane-air system. The present paper addresses production rates of oxides of nitrogen in this flamelet by one-step reduced-chemistry descriptions of both thermal and prompt mechanisms, for both two-step and three-step methane-air reduced chemistry, and also reports some results of calculations of production rates with a full-chemistry description of planar counterflow flames, for purposes of comparison. The comparisons suggest that the asymptotic approximations significantly overestimate production rates and fail as extinction is approached but give qualitatively correct trends away from extinction. These trends show that increasing the tip curvature of the flamelet increases the prompt contribution while decreasing the thermal contribution. It is concluded that more research is needed on both elementary rates and asymptotic descriptions, especially for the prompt mechanism.