Adaptive Chemistry for Reacting Flow Simulations
Pisi Lu, Luwi Oluwole, W.H. Green, Prof. Paul Barton
Supported by Alstom Power; Dept. of Energy
Portions of the work done in collaboration with: Yee San Su, Prof. Jackie Ying

Working both with in-house CFD codes (DUNS) and popular commerical CFD codes (Fluent), we are developing tools for the robust and efficient calculation of flow fields with complex chemistry. Our interests lie in two areas:

a) to compute flow fields with complex chemistry robustly by looking at a number of different solvers

b) to increase the efficiency of these schemes. One of our main strategies for doing this is using Adaptive Chemistry.

Adaptive Chemistry is based on the observation that in different regions of the flow field, different types of chemistry will dominate. Instead of solving the flow field with a mechanism appropriate for the full range of conditions that exist within the flow, we allow the chemistry to 'adapt' such that it solves only the chemistry appropriate for that local area. Depending on the type of flow field you are attempting to solve, the increase in efficiency could be substantial. Recently we have begun extending this approach to heterogeneous catalyst (gas-solid) systems.