The Soret effect in naturally propagating, premixed, lean, hydrogen-air flames

Comparatively little attention has been given to multicomponent diffusion effects in lean hydrogen-air flames, in spite of the importance of these flames in safety and their potential importance to future energy technologies. Prior direct numerical simulations either have considered only the mixture-averaged transport model, or have been limited to stabilized flames that do not exhibit the thermo-diffusive instability. The so-called full, multicomponent transport model with cross-diffusion is found to predict hotter, significantly faster flames with much faster extinction and division of cellular structures. (C) 2009 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.