Conditional moment closure for large eddy simulation of nonpremixed turbulent reacting flows

A method for closing the chemical source terms in the filtered governing eq uations of motion is proposed. Conditional filtered means of quantities app earing in the chemical reaction rate expressions are approximated by assumi ng that these conditional filtered means are constant for some ensemble of points in the resolved flow field; for such an ensemble, integral equations can be solved for the conditional filtered means. These conditional filter ed means are then used to approximate the conditional filtered mean of the chemical source term by invoking the Conditional Moment Closure hypothesis. The filtered means of the chemical source terms are obtained by integratin g their conditional filtered means over the filtered density function of th e conditioning variable(s). The method is applied to direct numerical simul ation results to directly compare the prediction of the reaction rates with the actual filtered reaction rates. The results of this a priori test appe ar to show that the method is capable of predicting the filtered reaction r ates with adequate accuracy-even in the presence of heat release, and local extinction phenomena. This is especially true for predictions obtained usi ng two conditioning variables. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S10 70-6631(99)00607-8].