A work on turbulent premixed combustion is important because of increased concern about the environmental impact of combustion and the search for new combustion concepts and technologies. An improved understanding of lean fuel turbulent premixed flames must play a central role in the fundamental science of these new concepts. Lean premixed flames have the potential to offer ultra-low emission levels, but they are notoriously susceptible to combustion oscillations. Thus, sophisticated control measures are inevitably required. The editors' intent is to set out the modeling aspects in the field of turbulent premixed combustion. Good progress has been made on this topic, and this cohesive volume contains contributions from international experts on various subtopics of the lean premixed flame problem.

The combustion of fossil fuels remains a key technology for the foreseeable future. It is therefore important that we understand the mechanisms of combustion and, in particular, the role of turbulence within this process. Combustion always takes place within a turbulent flow field for two reasons: turbulence increases the mixing process and enhances combustion, but at the same time combustion releases heat which generates flow instability through buoyancy, thus enhancing the transition to turbulence. The four chapters of this book present a thorough introduction to the field of turbulent combustion. After an overview of modeling approaches, the three remaining chapters consider the three distinct cases of premixed, non-premixed, and partially premixed combustion, respectively. This book will be of value to researchers and students of engineering and applied mathematics by demonstrating the current theories of turbulent combustion within a unified presentation of the field.

This volume gathers the contributions of six world experts to a course on combustion modelling. Therefore, a pedagogical effort has been made in writing up these texts, which cover state of the art advances in most aspects of combustion science. The book is aimed at students, researches and engineers, as was the course.

Turbulent reactive flows are of common occurrance in combustion engineering, chemical reactor technology and various types of engines producing power and thrust utilizing chemical and nuclear fuels. Pollutant formation and dispersion in the atmospheric environment and in rivers, lakes and ocean also involve interactions between turbulence, chemical reactivity and heat and mass transfer processes. Considerable advances have occurred over the past twenty years in the understanding, analysis, measurement, prediction and control of turbulent reactive flows. Two main contributors to such advances are improvements in instrumentation and spectacular growth in computation: hardware, sciences and skills and data processing software, each leading to developments in others. Turbulence presents several features that are situation-specific. Both for that reason and a number of others, it is yet difficult to visualize a so-called solution of the turbulence problem or even a generalized approach to the problem. It appears that recognition of patterns and structures in turbulent flow and their study based on considerations of stability, interactions, chaos and fractal character may be opening up an avenue of research that may be leading to a generalized approach to classification and analysis and, possibly, prediction of specific processes in the flowfield. Predictions for engineering use, on the other hand, can be foreseen for sometime to come to depend upon modeling of selected features of turbulence at various levels of sophistication dictated by perceived need and available capability.

Detailed study of the rates and mechanisms of combustion reactions has not been in the mainstream of combustion research until the recent recognition that further progress in optimizing burner performance and reducing pollutant emission can only be done with fundamental understanding of combustion chemistry. This has become apparent at a time when our understanding of the chemistry, at least of small-molecule combustion, and our ability to model combustion processes on large computers have developed to the point that real confidence can be placed in the results. This book is an introduction for outsiders or beginners as well as a reference work for people already active in the field. Because the spectrum of combustion scientists ranges from chemists with little computing experience to engineers who have had only one college chemistry course, everything needed to bring all kinds of beginners up to the level of current practice in detailed combustion modeling is included. It was a temptation to include critical discussions of modeling results and computer programs that would enable outsiders to start quickly into problem solving. We elected not to do either, because we feel that the former are better put into the primary research literature and that people who are going to do combustion modeling should either write their own programs or collaborate with experts. The only exception to this is in the thermochemical area, where programs have been included to do routine fitting operations. For reference purposes there are tables of thermochemical, transport-property, and rate coefficient data.