Modeling the reactive flow of semi-continuous mixtures by the adaptive characterization method

Abstract

This work proposes and analyzes the direct quadrature method of moments (DQMoM) applied to the adaptive characterization of pseudo-components for simulating semi-continuous reactive mixtures’ flow. We also extended the fixed point quadrature method (FPQM) by expanding its scope to solve field problems and use discrete distributions as initial or inlet data. We implemented both methods in OpenFOAM® and used them to simulate the thermal cracking of hydrocarbon mixtures, guaranteeing mesh convergence. The FPQM results showed poor convergence behavior, while the DQMoM results converged regarding the number of quadrature points. DQMOM was up to 4.9 faster than FPQM for our reactive flow test case.