Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Many turbulent premixed flames of practical interest are statistically stationary. They occur in combustors that have anchoring mechanisms to prevent blow-off and flashback. The stabilization devices often introduce a level of geometric complexity that is prohibitive for detailed computational studies of turbulent flame dynamics. As a result, typical detailed simulations are performed in simplified model configurations such as decaying isotropic turbulence or inflowing turbulence. In these configurations, the turbulence seen by the flame either decays or, in the latter case, increases as the flame accelerates toward the turbulent inflow. This limits the duration of the eddy evolutions experienced by the flame at a given level of turbulent intensity, so that statistically valid observations cannot be made. In this paper, we apply a feedback control to computationally stabilize an otherwise unstable turbulent premixed flame in two dimensions. For the simulations, we specify turbulent inflow conditions and dynamically adjust the integrated fueling rate to control the mean location of the flame in the domain. We outline the numerical procedure, and illustrate the behavior of the control algorithm. We use the simulations to study the propagation and the local chemical variability of turbulent flame chemistry.