Modeling extinction and reignition in turbulent flames

Abstract

The conditional moment closure method (CMC) has been extended to improve reactive species predictions in flames with significant local extinction and reignition. Simple first-order closure of the conditionally averaged reaction rate term does not give satisfactory results due to large fluctuations around the conditional mean and an alternative closure is suggested here. The new closure is based on a precomputed parameterized reference field that maps reactive species mass fractions as functions of mixture fraction and sensible enthalpy. During the computations, the reference field is continuously adjusted to ensure consistency with the CMC solution and doubly conditioned chemical source terms that are functions of time, space, mixture fraction, and sensible enthalpy can thus be obtained. Integration over sensible enthalpy space yields the improved singly conditioned chemical source term that can be used for the solution of the CMC equations. Full closure can be achieved by assuming a β-PDF for the probability distribution in sensible enthalpy space and an additional conditional variance equation needs to be solved. The overall agreement between the measured and the computed variance is satisfactory and the extended CMC model is applied to Sandia Flames D, E, and F. Excellent predictions of temperature, major species, intermediates, and NO are obtained in Flames D and E while temperature predictions can be significantly improved in Sandia Flame F.