Resolving the shock-induced combustion by an adaptive mesh redistribution method (Q886043)

Shock-induced combustion is the self-ignited combustion phenomenon of a premixed gas induced by a shock wave propagating in the gas mixture. The flow-field of the shock-induced combustion is characterized by the coupling and interactions among the shock wave, combustion front, and combustion instability, which result in various and distinctive flow and wave structures. One difficulty in numerical simulations is how to capture the coupling and separation between shock and combustion fronts. If the numerical scheme is not accurate enough or the grid size is not sufficiently fine to capture the fastest process, errors in the computed quantities can cause the release of chemical energy to be too fast, resulting in so-called spurious runaway chemical reactions. The governing equations for the chemically reacting viscous flows are the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with chemical source terms and diffusion for a mixture composed of different gas species. The cases of a two-dimensional plane flow and axisymmetric flow are treated. It is assumed that all species are thermally perfect, in thermal equilibrium and have the same temperature. Two reaction mechanisms for the hydrogen-air mixture combustion are used and their simulation effects are compared. In the paper an adaptive mesh redistribution method, that is able to resolve shock and combustion waves as well as the induction zone, is developed. The method is composed of two independent ingredients: a flow solver and a mesh redistribution algorithm. The flow solver is a finite-volume based second order upwind TVD scheme of Harten-Yee type, together with a lower-upper symmetric Gauss-Seidel relaxation scheme for solving the multi-species Navier-Stokes equations with finite rate chemistry. The chemical source terms are treated by a point-wise implicit approach. The adaptive mesh is determined by a grid generation method based on solving Poisson equations, with the monitor function carefully designed to resolve both sharp fronts and the induction zone between them. The peculiarity of the present monitor function is the relative rate of change of mass fractions, which is shown to be effective for resolving the induction zone. Numerical simulations of supersonic flows past an axisymmetric projectile in a premixed hydrogen/oxygen mixture are carried out. The results show that the spurious runaway chemical reactions appearing on coarse grids can be eliminated by using adaptive meshes without invoking any ad hoc treatment for reaction rates. The adaptive mesh approach is more effective than the fixed mesh one in obtaining grid-independent results. Finally, some discrepancies between numerical and benchmark experimental results are discussed. For example, simulations with a fine mesh do not reproduce the experimentally observed deflection of the combustion front and the secondary shock in the flank of the projectile.