Chemical energy release and dynamics of transitional, reactive shear flows

Results are reported from numerical studies of a compressible, subsonic reactive mixing layer, on the the effects of chemical‐reaction exothermicity on the shear‐layer development, and the dependence of these effects on initial conditions. The model solves the unsteady, conservation equations for mass, momentum, energy, and species concentrations. The convective transport equations are solved using the flux‐corrected transport (FCT) algorithm and appropriate inflow and outflow boundary conditions. A one‐step, irreversible, Arrhenius chemical reaction rate, and realistic (species‐ and temperature‐dependent) modeling of diffusive transport are coupled with the convective transport using time‐step splitting. The system studied consists of nonpremixed coflowing streams, where both the fuel (faster stream, hydrogen) and the oxidizer (slower stream, oxygen) are diluted in nitrogen. To facilitate the analysis of the results the flow is organized by low‐level, single‐frequency velocity perturbation at the inflow....