Scalar flux molecular transport term

The first term on the right-hand side of this expression is the molecular transport term that scales as Sc Re 1. Thus, at high Reynolds numbers,26 it can be neglected. The two new unclosed terms in (3.88) are the scalar flux (u.ja), and the mean chemical source term (Sa(chemical reacting flows, the modeling of (Sa(0)) is of greatest concern, and we discuss this aspect in detail in Chapter 5. 

Thus, the closure problem reduces to finding an appropriate expression for the scalar flux (Ujtp). In high-Reynolds-number turbulent flows, the molecular transport term is again negligible. Thus, the scalar-flux term is responsible for the rapid mixing observed in turbulent flows. 

The last term on the right-hand side is unclosed and represents scalar transport due to velocity fluctuations. The turbulent scalar flux ( , varies on length scales on the order of the turbulence integral scales Lu, and hence is independent of molecular properties (i.e., v and T).17 In a CFD calculation, this implies that the grid size needed to resolve (4.70) must be proportional to the integral scale, and not the Batchelor scale as required in DNS. In this section, we look at two types of models for the scalar flux. The first is an extension of turbulent-viscosity-based models to describe the scalar field, while the second is a second-order model that is used in conjunction with Reynolds-stress models. 

Turbulent mixing (i.e., the scalar flux) transports fluid elements in real space, but leaves the scalars unchanged in composition space. This implies that in the absence of molecular diffusion and chemistry the one-point composition PDF in homogeneous turbulence will remain unchanged for all time. Contrast this to the velocity field which quickly approaches a multi-variate Gaussian PDF due, mainly, to the fluctuating pressure term in (6.47). 

Closure of the mean scalar field equation requires a model for the scalar flux term. This term represents the scalar transport due to velocity fluctuations in the inertial subrange of the energy spectrum and is normally independent of the molecular diffusivity. The gradient diffusion model is often successfully employed (e.g., [15, 78, 2]) ... 

Equation (3) takes a similar form for both time-averaged and instantaneous quantities. In the time-averaged case, F is a turbulent eddy flux pu c, where overbars and primes denote time means and fluctuations, respectively. In the instantaneous case, F is a molecular diffusive flux which in practice can be neglected in the open air (on Sq) relative to fluxes arising from fluid motion (the high Peclet number approximation). In this case the fluid-motion fluxes appear in the term pc(u — v), which is unaveraged and includes transport by turbulent fluctuations as well as by the mean flow. In contrast with the situation in the open air (on Sq), molecular fluxes can never be neglected at solid boundaries (S,), where they are responsible for all the scalar transport. 

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