Extension to inhomogeneous flows

In order to overcome the difficulties of following Lagrangian particles in a realistic manner, most Lagrangian micromixing studies have had to eliminate back-mixing and 

In other words, mean convection, turbulent diffusion, production, and dissipation. 

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Figure 5.16. The four-environment model divides a homogeneous flow into four environments, each with its own local concentration vector. The joint concentration PDF is thus represented by four delta functions. The area under each delta function, as well as its location in concentration space, depends on the rates of exchange between environments. Since the same model can be employed for the mixture fraction, the exchange rates can be partially determined by forcing the four-environment model to predict the correct decay rate for the mixture-fraction variance. The extension to inhomogeneous flows is discussed in Section 5.10.

The model can be written in terms of )n. However, we shall see that the extension to inhomogeneous flows is trivial when (s) is used. 

In an effort to improve the description of the Reynolds stresses in the rapid distortion turbulence (RDT) limit, the velocity PDF description has been extended to include directional information in the form of a random wave vector by Van Slooten and Pope (1997). The added directional information results in a transported PDF model that corresponds to the directional spectrum of the velocity field in wavenumber space. The model thus represents a bridge between Reynolds-stress models and more detailed spectral turbulence models. Due to the exact representation of spatial transport terms in the PDF formulation, the extension to inhomogeneous flows is straightforward (Van Slooten et al. 1998), and maintains the exact solution in the RDT limit. The model has yet to be extensively tested in complex flows (see Van Slooten and Pope 1999) however, it has the potential to improve greatly the turbulence description for high-shear flows. More details on this modeling approach can be found in Pope (2000). 

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