Abstract :

Alternative fuels are being designed to replace conventional fossil fuels and this currently relies on in-flight testing which is tedious, time-consuming and most of all, incredibly expensive. Computational methods, in conjunction with optimization strategies, can make a big impact in accelerating the design process, and help identify novel fuel mixtures. Prior to that, one must understand the difficulties in modeling the combustion process of these complicated fuels, make the problem computationally tractable and identify approximation regimes. This talk will discuss the simulation of multicomponent fuels in a spray-combustion setting and this requires i) a simplified framework for predicting multicomponent droplet evaporation ii) formulation of reduced descriptions of fuels iii) identifying regimes of multicomponent spray combustion and iv) the effect of turbulence on ignition of multicomponent sprays.