Syngas is a gaseous mixture mainly composed of CO and H2, which constitutes a major feedstock in petrochemical industry. Several industrial approaches are commonly used to produce it. Non catalytic Partial Oxidation (POX) and Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) are two of them. Autothermal Reforming (ATR) is a third process that combines both POX and SMR in the same reactor. A better knowledge of the reactive flow properties inside the chamber is required in order to improve the ATR process efficiency. Numerical simulation appears as an efficient tool to reach this goal. Because of the high CPU cost required for these simulations, RANS (Reynolds Average Numerical Simulation) formulation is usually preferred for the simulation of the whole chamber. This approach relies on the use of models, like the turbulent combustion model that aims at describing the interactions between turbulence and chemical reactions. Several approaches have been proposed to compute it, which benefit from a relatively wide experience for the simulation of classical combustion systems. However, ATR flames have some specific properties that make them quite different from these classical configurations, especially because of high pressure, reactants dilution with water and high global equivalence ratio. The validity of classical turbulent combustion models therefore requires to be assessed in ATR configurations. The objective of this thesis is to meet this need by testing the validity of several turbulent combustion models. The first part of this work has been to analyze water-enriched CH4/O2 flames properties at high pressure. In particular, a strategy for evaluating characteristic chemical time scales of a reactive system has been proposed within this context. In a second part, a DNS numerical experiment has been performed. Its results are then used as a benchmark for a priori testing several turbulent combustion models in the context of ATR reactor RANS simulations.
