Abstract
Controlling flame shapes and emissions is a major objective for all combustion engineers. Considering the complexity of reacting flows, novel optimization methods are required: this paper explores the application of control theory for partial differential equations to combustion. Both flame temperature and pollutant levels are optimized in a laminar Bunsen burner computed with complex chemistry using a recursive semi-deterministic global optimization algorithm. In order to keep the computational time low, the optimization procedure is coupled with mesh adaptation and incomplete gradient techniques.