Chemical source term time scales

In many applications, due to the large value of k, the first reaction is essentially instantaneous compared to the characteristic flow time scales. Thus, if the transport equation is used to solve for Y, the chemical-source term iS) will make the CFD code converge slowly. To avoid this problem, Y can be written in terms of by setting the corresponding reaction-rate expression (S ) equal to zero as follows ... 

In this section, we first introduce the standard form of the chemical source term for both elementary and non-elementary reactions. We then show how to transform the composition vector into reacting and conserved vectors based on the form of the reaction coefficient matrix. We conclude by looking at how the chemical source term is affected by Reynolds averaging, and define the chemical time scales based on the Jacobian of the chemical source term. 

Figure 5.1. Closures for the chemical source term can be understood in terms of their relationship to the joint composition PDF. The simplest methods attempt to represent the joint PDF by its (lower-order) moments. At the next level, the joint PDF is expressed in terms of the product of the conditional joint PDF and the mixture-fraction PDF. The conditional joint PDF can then be approximated by invoking the fast-chemistry or flamelet limits, by modeling the conditional means of the compositions, or by assuming a functional form for the PDF. Similarly, it is also possible to assume a functional form for the joint composition PDF. The best method to employ depends strongly on the functional form of the chemical source term and its characteristic time scales.

The chemical time scales can be defined in terms of the eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix of the chemical source term.27 For example, for an isothermal system the K x K Jacobian matrix of the chemical source term is given by d S... 

Due to the conservation of elements, the rank of J will lie less than or equal to K — E 1 In general, rank(J) = Ny < K - E, which implies that V = K — T eigenvalues of J are null. Moreover, since M is a similarity transformation, (5.51) implies that the eigenvalues of J and those of J are identical. We can thus limit the definition of the chemical time scales to include only the Nr finite ra found from (5.50). The other N components of the transformed composition vector correspond to conserved scalars for which no chemical-source-term closure is required. The same comments would apply if the Nr non-zero singular values of J were used to define the chemical time scales. 

In this limit, the mixing time scale (r ) is infinite and thus (5.61) predicts correctly that (SA) is null. In the other limit where is null, the mixture-fraction variance will also be null, so that (5.61) again predicts the correct limiting value for the mean chemical source term. Between these two limits, the magnitude of (SA) will be decreased due to the finite... 

As discussed in Chapter 5, the chemical time scales can be found from the Jacobian of the chemical source term. 

The generalized transport equation, equation 17, can be dissected into terms describing bulk flow (term 2), turbulent diffusion (term 3) and other processes, eg, sources or chemical reactions (term 4), each having an impact on the time evolution of the transported property. In many systems, such as urban smog, the processes have very different time scales and can be viewed as being relatively independent over a short time period, allowing the equation to be "spht" into separate operators. This greatly shortens solution times (74). The solution sequence is... 

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