The joint probability density function of mixture fraction, reaction progress variable, and total enthalpy in a stratified, swirl-stabilized turbulent flame

Abstract

The three-condition version of the uniform conditional state combustion model makes use of the mixture fraction, progress variable, and normalized total enthalpy as conditioning variables to build a three-dimensional conditional manifold for chemistry. In order to map the solution in conditional space into the flow domain, the joint Probability Density Function (PDF) of the conditioning variables needs to be modeled. In simulations, presumed functions (i.e., β-PDF for the mixture fraction and progress variable and δ-PDF for total enthalpy) are often used for modeling the marginal PDFs. In this work, the measurements from the Cambridge/Sandia burner are employed to obtain the marginal PDFs for the conditioning variables at various points in the reacting domain. The measurements are then combined from all positions in space to form conditional PDFs of the normalized total enthalpy for various values of the other two variables. In the vicinity of the flame brush, the marginal PDF of the normalized total enthalpy resembles a bimodal Gaussian distribution; nonetheless, the conditional PDFs for this variable are nearly Gaussian distributions. The correlation coefficients between the conditioning variables are also investigated, and the assumption of their statistical independence is examined. To consider the association between the conditioning variables for modeling, the copula concept is introduced, and the performances of three different copulas are tested. Furthermore, the statistical moments of the conditioning variables are computed from the experimental data at different points and are utilized for modeling the joint PDF of the conditioning variables from two different approaches that are compared.