A Computational Fluid Dynamics Model of Shockwave Initiated Combustion

Shock tubes are as near to an ideal reactor as most current chemical kinetics studies can go. As reaction temperatures decrease, homogeneous combustion within a shock tube begins to display inhomogeneous modes, which are described as a deflagration to detonation transition in a typical Hydrogen-Oxygen system. End and side-wall imaging were used to examine flame structure and chemical kinetics in an experimental system at the University of Central Florida’s low-pressure shock tube. The goal of this study is to use chemistry and computational fluid dynamics modeling to establish a foundation for these findings. To correctly simulate the system, the model will employ Siemens STAR-CCM+ computational fluid dynamics software. To precisely represent the initialization, propagation, and termination of the combustion inside the model, a seven-step reaction mechanism will be implemented. The study’s ultimate objective is to develop a lightweight hydrogen-oxygen combustion model with a shock tube for baselining purposes. In this work, a two-dimensional model was used. Although some combustion events are not represented as well as a higher fidelity, substantially more computationally expensive model would, the simulation results show strong conditioning and correlation with the experimental data.