Laminar flamelet modeling of a turbulent CH4/H2/N2 jet diffusion flame using artificial neural networks

The laminar flamelet concept is used in the prediction of mean reactive scalars in a non-premixed turbulent CH4/H-2/N-2 flame. First, a databank for temperature and species concentrations is developed from the solutions of counter-flow diffusion flames. The effects of flow field on flamelets are considered by using mixture fraction and scalar dissipation rate. Turbulence-chemistry interactions are taken into account by integrating different quantities based on a presumed probability density function (PDF), to calculate the Favre-averaged values of scalars. Flamelet library is then generated. To interpolate in the generated library, one artificial neural network (ANN) is trained where the mean and variance of mixture fraction and the scalar dissipation rate are used as inputs, and species mean mass fractions and temperature are selected as outputs. The weights and biases of this ANN are implemented in a CFD flow solver code, to estimate mean values of the scalars. Results reveal that ANN yields good predictions and the computational time has decreased as compared to numerical integration for the estimation of mean thermo-chemical variables in the CFD code. Predicted thermo-chemical quantities are close to those from experimental measurements but some discrepancies exist, which are mainly due to the assumption of non-unity Lewis number in the calculations. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.