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Abstract The switch from fossil fuels to hydrogen represents a break-through path towards the decarbonization of the aeronautical sector. However, compared to hydrocarbons, hydrogen has very different characteristics. This challenges the current state of the art of numerical methods that must be re-evaluated in terms of accuracy and computational cost for aeronautical applications. Large Eddy Simulations (LES) applied to hydrogen combustion can easily become too costly with respect to the industrial constraints. In this work, a study to reduce the time-to-solution in LES is performed. The selected configuration is a two-staged swirled combustor. The reference LES setup includes a detailed chemical description by using a 21-species, 64-reactions chemical scheme (including NOx) and the thickened flame model to handle turbulent combustion. From this, different numerical combinations are investigated for each phase of the simulation (from non-reactive flow to flame stabilisation) as well in terms of chemistry description to minimise the LES return time. Ultimately, the switch towards a lighter 9-species, 12-reactions chemical scheme and the inclusion of NOx with a tabulated formalism is retained as optimized setup. This choice determines all in all a 50% reduction in terms of computational cost with respect to the reference setup, keeping the experimental flame topology fairly well retrieved. The general trend for NOx emissions at the burner outlet is as well correctly captured, even if the chosen methodologies differ on the absolute values.
Buisson et al. (Mon,) studied this question.