The Equivalence Principle and its Application to Scaling Laws for Reacting Flows: What the “Real World” Combustion Industry Wants

Abstract

Although direct numerical simulations (DNS) and large eddy simulations (LES) of turbulent reacting flows are used in academia and national laboratories to study various phenomena associated with such flows, the combustion industry primarily uses simple scaling laws to understand and optimize reacting flows for real-world applications. Though not widely known, for non-reacting flows there is a formal procedure for developing highly-accurate fundamentally-based scaling laws for a wide range of simple and non-simple flows. Traditionally, these scaling laws for non-reacting flows have been used by industry as a starting point to develop empirical scaling laws for reacting flows. However, it has recently been shown how the scaling laws for non-reacting flows can be rigorously extended to reacting flows, via an “equivalence principle”. This seminar will summarize this procedure, and will present resulting scaling laws obtained from this equivalence principle that apply to both non-reacting and reacting flows. The scaling laws from this are remarkably accurate for both reacting and non-reacting flows, and this new procedure is now widely used in the combustion industry to provide far more accurate predictions of combustion processes than has previously been possible.

WERNER J.A. DAHM

Arizona State University