Evaluation of the approximated diffusion flamelet concept using fuels with different chemical complexity

The ability of flamelet models to reproduce turbulent combustion in devices such as diesel engines or gas turbines has enhanced the usage of these approaches in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The models based on turbulent look-up tables generated from counterflow laminar diffusion flames (DF model) permit drastic reduction of the computational cost of the CFD calculation. Nevertheless, for complex molecular fuels, such as n-heptane, the oxidation process involves hundreds of species and the calculation of the transport equations together with the ODE system that models the chemical kinetics for the DF solution becomes unaffordable for industrial devices where hundreds of flamelets are required. In this context, new hypotheses have to be introduced in order to reduce the computational cost maintaining the coherence of the combustion process. Recently, a new model known as Approximated Diffusion Flamelet (ADF) has been proposed with the aim of solving the turbulent combustion for complex fuels in a reduced time. However, the validity of this model is still an open question and has to be verified in order to justify subsequent CFD calculations. This work assesses the ADF model and its ability to reproduce accurately the combustion process and its main parameters for three fuels with different chemical complexity and boundary conditions by its comparison with the DF model. Results show that although some discrepancies arise, the ADF model has the ability to correctly describe the ignition delay and the combustion structure in the auto-ignition zone that is the most relevant one for industrial processes.