Accelerated Combustion Simulations of Hydrogen–Air Flames in the HYLON Swirled Injector in OpenFOAM

This study presents the implementation and validation of C++ library modules within the OpenFOAM technology for high-fidelity simulations of multi-regime combustion in aeroengines. The Dynamic Thickened Flame Combustion Model for Large Eddy Simulations (DTFLES) is integrated with ordinary differential equation solvers to enable fast direct integration of finite-rate chemistry onto graphics processing units. The reacting solvers are extended to incorporate a mixture-averaged formulation for viscosity and thermal conductivity. Additionally, diffusion models are generalized to multicomponent mixtures to account for individual species contributions, along with corrections that support non-unity Lewis numbers in the diffusion terms of the convection-diffusion equations for chemical species. The methodology is validated against experimental data from the hydrogen-air flame produced by the HYLON (HYdrogen LOw NOx) hydrogen-air burner. The numerical results demonstrate the robustness, accuracy, and computational efficiency of the proposed approach, paving the way for future investigations into the complex physics of aeroengine installations powered by sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs).