Heat Transfer Effects on a Fully Premixed Methane Impinging Flame

The effects of heat transfer on engineering applications is a fundamental aspect in the design of power and propulsive systems. The heat exchange between fluid and solid parts may reduce the efficiency of the system in situations where temperature peaks and gradients become important. This is the case of gas turbines, combustion engines or cooling of turbine blades. However, this interaction is difficult to model numerically not only due to the different time scales governing each individual problem, but also due to instability issues related to the coupling strategy (Bunker, 2007). The coupling of the Navier-Stokes equations with the heat equation, also referred as conjugate heat transfer, usually requires the existence of two different solvers, one for each domain, exchanging information at specified boundaries. Partitioned or staggered algorithms can be applied to control the exchange of information allowing the solvers to advance at different time-steps with the most suitable formulation for each physical problem (Farhat and Lesoinne, 2000).