Assessment of soot formation models in lifted ethylene/air turbulent diffusion flame

In the present study, soot formation in the turbulent lifted diffusion flame, consisting of ethylene-air is numerically investigated using three different soot modeling approaches and is comprehensively reported. For turbulence-chemistry interaction, Flamelet generated manifold (FGM) model is used. A detailed kinetics is used which is represented through POLIMI mechanism (Ranzi et al., 2012). Soot formation is modeled using two different approaches, semi-empirical two-equation approach and Quadrature methods of moments approach, where both the approaches consider various sub-processes such as nucleation, coagulation, surface growth and oxidation. The radiation heat transfer is taken into account considering four fictitious gasses in conjunction with the weighted-sum-of-gray gas (WSSGM) approach for modeling absorption coefficient. The experimental and earlier published numerical data from Köhler et al. (2012) and Blacha et al. (2011) are used for assessment of different soot modeling approaches. The discrepancies between numerical and experimental data are observed due to under-prediction of OH radicals concentration and poor fuel-air mixing ratios in the vicinity of the fuel jet region leading to early soot formation and the trends are unaffected after invoking radiation.