Pressure Gradient Tailoring Effects on Simulated Flow Behind a Ballistic Bluff Body

We present simulations and analysis of non-reacting flow and reacting stabilized flames anchored on a ballistic bluff body in a confined channel. The simulations are performed with PeleC, a fully compressible, highly parallelized reacting flow code with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) based on the AMReX framework. This code is used here to fully resolve all spatial scales in areas of interest (e.g., regions of high vorticity or intermediary combustion species), while relying on coarse grids in less dynamically intensive regions. Following an experimental validation case, we tailor the mean pressure gradient in the channel using embedded boundaries to systematically study the magnitude and dynamical significance of baroclinic torque resulting from misalignments between pressure and density gradients, the latter of which results from combustion and heat transfer processes. The high-resolution simulations allow for additional three-dimensional insights and analysis of highly localized interactions, fully resolved here with AMR in the absence of any subgrid modeling for turbulence interactions.