Abstract
The current work aims to develop computational models for the thermal characteristics of turbulent CH4 flames for varying burner dimensions. This study develops a platform for data driven analysis of temperature prediction of turbulent non-premixed flames, in which the influence of flow and geometric parameters, including burner head diameter (D), half cone angles (α), and co-flow air velocity (Ucf), have been considered. The algorithms used were ridge regressor (RR), linear regressor (LR), and three variations of support vector regression (SVR): SVR with a linear kernel (SVR-LR), SVR with a radial basis function function (SVR-RBF), and SVR with a polynomial kernel (SVR-Poly). The performance of each computational model was evaluated and contrasted based on several metrics: mean absolute error (𝑀𝐴𝐸), regression coefficient (𝑅 2 ), mean absolute percent error (𝑀𝐴𝑃𝐸), and mean Poisson deviance (𝑀𝑃𝐷). From the modelling of the output data, it was observed that the SVR-RBF predictions were more accurate compared to those from the other algorithms, as it achieved the highest training 𝑅 2 value of 0.955. The testing predictions of RR, SVR-LR, SVR-RBF, and SVR-Poly algorithms were also robust, with 𝑅 2 values ranging between 0.91-0.94. It is, therefore, established that these computational models are effectively suited for predicting sensitive turbulent CH4 flame characteristics based on varying input factors.