Simulations of advanced combustion modes using detailed chemistry combined with tabulation and mechanism reduction techniques

Contino, Francesco [UCL] Lucchini, Tommaso [Politecnico di Milano] D'Errico, Gianluca [Politecnico di Milano] Duynslaegher, Catherine [UCL] Dias, Véronique [UCL] Jeanmart, Hervé [UCL]

Multi-dimensional models represent today consolidated tools to simulate the combustion process in HCCI and Diesel engines. Various approaches are available for this purpose, it is however widely accepted that detailed chemistry represents a fundamental prerequisite to obtain satisfactory results when the engine runs with complex injection strategies or advanced combustion modes. Yet, integrating such mechanisms generally results in prohibitive computational cost. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for fast and efficient simulations of combustion in internal combustion engines using detailed chemistry. For this purpose, techniques to tabulate the species reaction rates and to reduce the chemical mechanisms on the fly have been coupled. In this way, the computational overheads related to the use of these mechanisms are significantly reduced since tabulated reaction rates are re-used for cells with similar compositions and, when it becomes necessary to perform direct integration, only the relevant set of species and reactions is taken into account. The proposed approach named tabulation of dynamic adaptive chemistry (TDAC) has been implemented in the Lib-ICE code, which is a set of libraries and applications for IC engine modeling developed using the OpenFOAM® technology. In particular, a modified version of the in-situ adaptive tabulation (ISAT) algorithm has been developed for systems with variable temperature and pressure, and the directed relation graph (DRG) method has been used to reduce the mechanism at run-time. The validation has been carried out with HCCI and Diesel cases both using a simplified case to compare the results obtained with and without TDAC, and a detailed case that is validated with experimental data. For each tested condition, a detailed comparison between computed and experimental data is provided along with the achieved speed-up factors compared to the use of direct-integration.