A numerical scheme for modelling reacting flow with detailed chemistry and transport.

An efficient projection scheme is developed for the simulation of reacting flow with detailed kinetics and transport. The scheme is based on a zero-Mach-number formulation of the compressible conservation equations for an ideal gas mixture. It is a modified version of the stiff operator-split scheme developed by Knio, Najm & Wyckoff (1999, J. Comput. Phys. 154, 428). Similar to its predecessor, the new scheme relies on Strang splitting of the discrete evolution equations, where diffusion is integrated in two half steps that are symmetrically distributed around a single stiff step for the reaction source terms. The diffusive half-step is integrated using an explicit single-step, multistage, Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev (RKC) method, which replaces the explicit, multi-step, fractional sub-step approach used in the previous formulation. This modification maintains the overall second-order convergence properties of the scheme and enhances the efficiency of the computations by taking advantage of the extended real-stability region of the RKC scheme. Two additional efficiency-enhancements are also explored, based on an extrapolation procedure for the transport coefficients and on the use of approximate Jacobian data evaluated on a coarse mesh. By including these enhancement schemes, performance tests using 2D computations with a detailed C{sub 1}C{sub 2} methane-air mechanism and a detailed mixture-averaged transport model indicate that speedup factors of about 15 are achieved over the previous split-stiff scheme