Ricerc@Sapienza

The growing global energy consumption and civil transportation hinges ever more heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels. In addition, health-related issues of air pollution, impose strict constraints on combustion emissions and set stringent requirements on the efficiency of devices, whether for aeronautical or power generation applications. This calls for an ever growing presence of fundamental research in combustion science. It is therefore essential to recognize the role of turbulent premixed flames as a ubiquitous and primary constituent of combustion chamber phenomenology. Indeed, the underlying chamber turbulent flowfield, typically encompassing a spectrum of spatial and temporal scales, interacts with the propagating structure of premixed flames, giving rise to a complex fenomenology which is an extremely active and wide area of experimental, numerical and theoretical research.

Our research group at the Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at La Sapienza has a long standing experience in combustion research which ranges from the diagnostics of complex reactive fields, to the generation of reduced chemical kinetics mechanisms for higher hydrocarbons, to the numerical simulation of turbulent reactive fields.

In this respect, the group has been actively pursuing highly computationally intensive simulations of premixed turbulent flames with the objective of analyzing the role of domain size or, equivalently, flame scale, on their morphological and propagative features. This extremely novel area of research has proved very promising in unveiling new phenomenology which typically went undetected given the reduced domain size of state of the art direct numerical simulations.
In light of the promising features of this research we put forth this proposal with the objective of extending the scale of our current simulations and, concurrently, to ensure continuity to these activities in terms of development of more effective numerical infrastructures.