Impact of Flame-Generated Turbulent Intensity and Flame Speed on the Low-Order Modelling of Light-Round

A previously-developed low-order Lagrangian stochastic model for ignition of premixed and non-premixed flames is modified in this paper to improve the numerical prediction of the light-round process in premixed annular combustors. The model refinements take into account Flame-Generated Turbulent Intensity (FGTI) and impose a turbulent flame speed correlation to the flame particles using expressions from the literature. For this, using RANS CFD results as an input, the model was applied to simulate the ignition transient in a premixed, swirled bluff body stabilised annular combustor to characterise the light-round time, both in stable conditions and close to the stability limits. Several cases were analysed, where flame speed and fuel were varied and light-round times were compared to experimental results. The proposed modifications improved the accuracy of the light-round time predictions, suggesting that FGTI may be an important phenomenon to be modelled. This modified model coupled with dilatation and the Peter’s assumption for the turbulent flame speed resulted in considerable improvement for the light-round time calculation for the explored range of parameters. This is an attractive feature considering the low computational cost of these simulations, which can be run in a single core of a local workstation. The improved model can help gas turbine engineers assess the ignition behaviour of annular combustors early in the design process.