Events Calendar

Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series

Speaker: John B. Bell, Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley

Talk Title: Low Mach Number Simulation of Turbulent Combustion

Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series

Abstract: Numerical simulation of turbulent reacting flows with comprehensive kinetics is one of the most demanding areas of computational fluid dynamics. High-fidelity modeling requires accurate fluid mechanics, detailed models for multicomponent transport and detailed chemical mechanisms. An important aspect of turbulent flames in most combustion systems is that they occur in a low Mach number regime. By exploiting the separation of scales inherent in low Mach number flows one can potentially obtain significant computational savings, enabling a wider range of problems to be modeled. However, accurate numerical solution of the low Mach number reacting flow equations, which are structurally similar to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, introduces a number of challenges. Here, we discuss some of these issues, focusing on treating the low Mach number constraint and the coupling of processes with different temporal scales. Results illustrating the methodology on turbulent combustion problems with detailed chemistry and transport will be presented.

Biography: John Bell is a Senior Staff Mathematician at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Chief Scientist of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division. His research focuses on the development and analysis of numerical methods for partial differential equations arising in science and engineering. He has made contributions in the areas of finite volume methods, numerical methods for low Mach number flows, adaptive mesh refinement, stochastic differential equations, interface tracking and parallel computing. He has also worked on the application of these numerical methods to problems from a broad range of fields, including combustion, shock physics, seismology, and flow in porous media, mesoscale fluid modeling and astrophysics.

Host: Paul Ronney

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Valerie Childress