Numerical Simulations of Turbulent Combustion

Turbulent burning of gaseous fuels is widely used for energy conversion in stationary power generation, e.g., gas turbines, land transportation, piston engines, and aviation, and aero-engine afterburners. Nevertheless, our fundamental understanding of turbulent combustion is still limited, because it is a highly non-linear and multiscale process that involves various local phenomena and thousands (e.g., for gasoline-air mixtures) of chemical reactions between hundreds of species, including several reactions that control emissions from flames. Therefore, there is a strong need for elaborating high fidelity, advanced numerical models, and methods that will catch the governing physical mechanisms of flame-turbulence interaction and, consequently, will make turbulent combustion computations an efficient predictive tool for applied research and, in particular, for development of a new generation of ultra-clean and highly efficient internal combustion engines that will allow society to properly respond to current environmental and efficiency challenges. Accordingly, papers published in this Special Issue (i) contribute to our fundamental understanding of flame-turbulence interaction by analyzing results of unsteady multi-dimensional numerical simulations and (ii) develop and validate high-fidelity models and efficient numerical methods for computational fluid Dynamics research into turbulent combustion in laboratory burners and engines.