Direct numerical simulation of turbulent flows with chemical reaction

Results from full turbulence simulations incorporating the effects of chemical reaction are compared with simple closure theories and used to reveal some physical insights about turbulent reacting flows. Pseudospectral methods for homogeneous turbulent flows with constant physical and thermal properties in domains as large as 643 Fourier modes were used for these simulations. For the case of nonpremixed flows involving a two-species, second-order, irreversible chemical reaction, it is found that the scalar dissipation microscale is only a weak function of the reaction rate and that chemical reaction contributes very little to the decay of the variance of the reactant concentration. Examination of local values of the velocity and concentration fields shows that the local reaction rate is highest in regions of the greatest rates of strain and that vorticity tends to align with the reaction zone. Finally, difficulties associated with the evaluation of multipoint pdf's and with the archival of time-dependent data from the threedimensional simulations are described.

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