The effect of Volume Expansion on the Propagation of Wrinkled Laminar Premixed Flame

Under certain circumstance, premixed turbulent flame can be treated as wrinkled thin laminar flame and its motion in a hydrodynamic flow field has been investigated by employing G-equation. Past studies on G-equation successfully described certain aspects of laminar flame propagation such as effects of stretch on flame speed. In those studies, flames were regarded as a passive interface that does not influence the flow field. The experimental evidences, however, indicate that flow field can be significantly modified by the propagation of flames through the volume expansion of burned gas. In the present study, a new method to be used with G -equation is described to include the effect of volume expansion in the flame dynamics. The effect of volume expansion on the flow field is approximated by Biot-Savart law. The newly developed model is validated by comparison with existing analytical solutions of G -equation to predict flames propagating in hydrodynamic flow field without volume expansion. To further investigate the influence of volume expansion, present method was applied to initially wrinkled or planar flame propagating in an imposed velocity field and the average flame speed was evaluated from the ratio of flame surface area and projected area of unburned stream channel. It was observed that the initial wrinkling of flame cannot sustain itself without velocity disturbance and wrinkled structure decays into planar flame as the flame propagates. The rate of decay of the structure increased with volume expansion. The asymptotic change in the average burning speed occurs only with disturbed velocity field. Because volume expansion acts directly on the velocity field, the average burning speed is affected at all time when its effect is included. With relatively small temperature ratio of 3, the average flame speed increased 10%. The combined effect of volume expansion and flame stretch is also considered and the result implied that the effect of stretch is independent of volume release.