| Description |
Energy generation through combustion of hydrocarbons continues to dominate as the most common method for energy generation. In the U.S., nearly 84% of the energy consumption comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. Because of this demand, there is a continued need for improvement, enhancement, and understanding of the combustion process. As computational power increases, and our methods for modelling these complex combustion systems improve, combustion modelling has become an important tool in gaining deeper insight and understanding of these complex systems. The constant state of change in computational ability leads to a continual need for new combustion models that can take full advantage of the latest computational resources. To this end, the research presented here encompasses the development of new models which can be tailored to the available resources, allowing one to increase or decrease the amount of modelling error based on the available computational resources and desired accuracy. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to identify the low-dimensional manifolds which exist in turbulent combustion systems. These manifolds are unique in there ability to represent a larger dimensional space with fewer components, resulting in a minimal addition of error. PCA is well-suited for the problem at hand because of its ability to allow the user to define the amount of error in approximation, depending on the resources at hand. The research presented here looks into various methods which exploit the benefits of PCA in modelling combustion systems, demonstrating several models, and providing new and interesting perspectives for the PCA-based approaches to modelling turbulent combustion. |
