Distributed-memory parallel computation of a forced, time-dependent, sooting, ethylene/air coflow diffusion flame

Forced, time-varying laminar flames help bridge the gap between laminar and turbulent combustion as they reside in an ever-changing flow environment. A distributed-memory parallel computation of a time-dependent sooting ethylene/air coflow diffusion flame, in which a periodic fluctuation (20 Hz) is imposed on the fuel velocity for four different amplitudes of modulation, is presented. The chemical mechanism involves 66 species, and a soot sectional model is employed with 20 soot sections. The governing equations are discretised using finite differences and solved implicitly using a damped modified Newton's method. The solution proceeds in parallel using strip domain decomposition over 40 central processing units (CPUs) until full periodicity is attained. For forcing amplitudes of 30%, 50%, 70% and 90%, a complete cycle of numerical predictions of the time-resolved soot volume fraction is presented. The 50%, 70% and 90% forcing cases display stretching and pinching off of the sooting region into an isolate...