A RANS flamelet–progress-variable method for computing reacting flows of real-gas mixtures

This paper provides an efficient numerical method for solving reacting flows of industrial interest in the presence of significant real-gas effects. The method combines a state-of-the-art solver of the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes equations – equipped with the low-Reynolds number k-ωk-ω turbulence closure – with a combustion flamelet–progress-variable approach. A real-gas model as well as a detailed kinetic scheme are used to generate the flamelet library. The method is tested versus several applications chosen to demonstrate the importance of the real-gas effects and of the kinetic scheme for computing high-pressure combustion. The major contribution of the paper is to provide a single-phase approach which solves turbulent reacting real-gas flows at a computational cost comparable with that of the simulation of a non-reacting flow thanks to the use of the flamelet library.