On the use of wavelets in computational combustion

The numerical simulation of combustion remains a challenging task. Flames a re often thin and occupy a relatively small volume within the domain of int erest. Nevertheless all of the combustion chemistry and much of the associa ted molecular transport takes place within the flame itself, giving rise to a structure that must be resolved if the simulated flame response is to be captured accurately. The present work examines the use of a wavelet-based method in this context. A spatial discretisation scheme using biorthogonal wavelets is presented and is applied to a test problem involving flame prop agation in a representative fuel-air mixture, in which the chemistry is tre ated using a standard four-step reduced reaction mechanism. A novel and ele gant boundary treatment is adopted in the wavelet scheme to enable the impl ementation of physically realistic boundary conditions. Results show that t he wavelet scheme is stable and accurate and, moreover, is able to exploit the natural data-compression properties of wavelets to represent the soluti on using a fraction of the storage required for more conventional methods. (C) 1998 Academic Press.