In this work the dependency of the turbulent burning speed on flame stretch in a premixed jet flame is analyzed. Considering a reference system attached to the front, the flame stretch is split into three contributions based on flame front curvature, normal fluid velocity and divergence of tangential velocity. The turbulent burning velocity is derived from the measure of the divergence of the mean unconditioned velocity field, that is taken as an estimate of the mean reaction rate in the context of flamelet hypothesis. The results are in a reasonable agreement with the literature data on turbulent combustion rates. Though the present methodology is more complex than the usual one based on reactant consumption rate, it provides the local burning speed and not the overall one. Combining these measurements with the local flame stretch, we show that, for a given flame, it exists a wide region along the flame height where the increase of the local flame speed in respect to the laminar unstretched one (stretching factor) is constant. Since the Reynolds number controls the small-scale behavior of turbulence, these findings denote a direct connection between the local, turbulence-induced, flame front deformation and the increase of the local flame propagation speed. The aim of this work is to establish correlations between the three different terms of flame stretch and the turbulent combustion speed that can lead to the definition of suitable closure models for turbulent combustion numerical simulations.

Suspensions are often found in different processes and applications, e.g. sediment transport in environments or pharmaceutical engineering. The laminar regime in the semi-dilute or dense cases, non vanishing volume fraction, is usually characterized by the sometime spectacular rheological properties induced by the suspended phase. Much less is known about dissipation and mixing in the turbulent regime. The aim of the present work is to investigate the turbulent channel flow of a fluid laden with rigid spherical particles at a fixed bulk Reynolds number Reh = U0h/ν = 2800. The particle radius is selected to be 18 times smaller than the channel half-width. Fully-resolved Direct Numerical Simulations with particle tracking and Immersed Boundary Method are presented for values of the volume fraction up to φ = 0.2. As expected for “large” particles, the overall drag increases with the volume fraction. We show that the presence of the particles deeply changes flow behavior, as already evident from the mean velocity profile with the canonical regions, buffer- or log-layer, strongly altered.

Turbophoresis is the migration of inertial particles towards the wall in a wall-bounded flow induced by turbulence. In this work, we analyze the effects of drag reducing polymer additives on turbophoresis in a turbulent channel flow. The numerical data set is obtained from a direct numerical simulation (DNS) of a turbulent channel flow of a viscoelastic fluid and laden with particles of different inertia. The results indicate that polymer additives decrease the turbophoretic drift. We establish that turbophoresis is reduced because of the smaller wall-normal variation of wall-normal fluid velocity fluctuations that occurs in all drag reducing flows. Hence a reduction of turbophoresis should be a common feature of all drag reducing flows such s fiber, bubble suspensions and MHD.

We present a direct comparison between interface-resolved and one-way-coupled point-particle direct numerical simulations (DNS) of gravity-free turbulent channel flow laden with small inertial particles, with high particle-to-fluid density ratio and diameter of approximately three viscous units. The most dilute flow considered, solid volume fraction O(10(-5)), shows the particle feedback on the flow to be negligible, whereas differences with respect to the unladen case, notably a drag increase of approximately 10 %, are found for a volume fraction O(10(-4)). This is attributed to a dense layer of particles at the wall, caused by turbophoresis, flowing with large particle-to-fluid apparent slip velocity. The most dilute case is therefore taken as the benchmark for assessing the validity of a widely used point-particle model, where the particle dynamics results only from inertial and nonlinear drag forces. In the bulk of the channel, the first- and second-order moments of the particle velocity from the point-particle DNS agree well with those from the interface-resolved DNS. Close to the wall, however, most of the statistics show major qualitative differences. We show that this difference originates from the strong shear-induced lift force acting on the particles in the near-wall region. This mechanism is well captured by the lift force model due to Saffman (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 22 (2), 1965, pp. 385-400), while other widely used, more elaborate, approaches aiming at extending the lift model for a wider range of particle Reynolds numbers can actually underpredict the magnitude of the near-wall particle velocity fluctuations for the cases analysed here.

In last decades, the increasing care to environmental safeguard and costs in the hydrocarbon fuel supplying have prompted in the development of alternative fuels, namely hydrogen based fuels as syngas. Syngas consists in a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (CO) in different relative concentration, in some cases with small concentration of methane. The aim of this work is to address the dynamics of turbulent hydrogen/carbon-monoxide/air Bunsen flames by means of Direct Numerical Simulation. The main issue is to understand how the thermo-diffusive instabilities occurring in pure hydrogen/air flame [7] are influenced by the presence of the carbon-monoxide. It is well known that the thermo-diffusive instabilities are mainly induced by the high hydrogen diffusivity leading to local quenching and temperature peaks in the flame with consequent increase of pollutant formation (e.g. NOx). The presence of carbon monoxide in the fuel mixture has significant effects in flame dynamics where we observe a damping of the H2/air flame instabilities with less apparent quenching and high temperature peaks. 

We consider suspensions of neutrally-buoyant finite-size rigid spherical particles in channel flow and investigate the relation between the particle dynamics and the mean bulk behavior of the mixture for Reynolds numbers 500 ≤ Re ≤ 5000 and particle volume fraction 0 ≤ Φ ≤ 0.3, via fully resolved numerical simulations. Analysis of the momentum balance reveals the existence of three different regimes: laminar, turbulent and inertial shear-thickening depending on which of the stress terms, viscous, Reynolds or particle stress, is the major responsible for the momentum transfer across the channel. We show that both Reynolds and particle stress dominated flows fall into the Bagnoldian inertial regime and that the Bagnold number can predict the bulk behavior although this is due to two distinct physical mechanisms. A turbulent flow is characterized by larger particle dispersion and a more uniform particle distribution, whereas the particulate-dominated flows is associated with a significant particle migration towards the channel center where the flow is smooth laminar-like and dispersion low. Interestingly, the collision kernel shows similar values in the different regimes, although the relative particle velocity and clustering clearly vary with inertia and particle concentration.

We use a stochastic model and direct numerical simulation to study the impact of turbulence on cloud droplet growth by condensation. We show that the variance of the droplet size distribution increases in time as t(1/2), with growth rate proportional to the large-to-small turbulent scale separation and to the turbulence integral scales but independent of the mean turbulent dissipation. Direct numerical simulations confirm this result and produce realistically broad droplet size spectra over time intervals of 20 min, comparable with the time of rain formation.

Inertial regimes in a channel flow of suspension of finite-size neutrally buoyant particles are studied for a wide range of Reynolds numbers: 500 ≤ Re ≤ 5000, and particle volume fractions: 0 ≤ Φ ≤ 0.3. The flow is classified in three different regimes according to the phase-averaged stress budget across the channel [2]. The laminar viscous regime at low Re and Φ where the viscous stress is the dominating term in the budget, the turbulent regime at high Re and relatively low Φ where the momentum is mainly transferred by the action of the Reynolds stress and the inertial shear-thickening regime where the particle stress contributes the most to the significant enhancement of the wall shear stress. Particle distribution and dispersion properties provide additional evidence for the existence of the three different regimes. 

The fractal scaling properties of turbulent premixed flame fronts have been investigated and considered for modeling sub-grid scales in the Large-Eddy-Simulation framework. Since the width of such thin reaction fronts cannot be resolved into the coarse mesh of LES, the extent of wrinkled flame surface contained in a volume is taken into account. The amount of unresolved flame front is estimated via the "wrinkling factor" that depends on the definition of a suitable fractal dimension and the scale at which the fractal scaling is lost, the inner cut-off length e. In this context, the present study considers laboratory experiments and one-step reaction DNS of turbulent premixed jet flames in different regimes of turbulent premixed flames. Fractal dimension is found to be substantially constant and well below that typical of passive scalar fronts. The inner cut-off length shows a clear scaling with the dissipative scale of Kolmogorov for the regimes here considered. These features have been exploited performing Large Eddy Simulations. Good model performance has been found comparing the LES against a corresponding DNS at moderate Reynolds number and experimental data at higher Reynolds numbers.