A New Paradigm in Modeling and Simulations of Complex Oxidation Chemistry Using a Statistical Approach

Abstract

The computationally accurate and efficient prediction of turbulent reactive flows remains an important research topic for several reasons, one of which is that the modeling of chemistry is still cumbersome, relatively inaccurate, and cannot portray the complex reactions associated with real fuels. To reduce computational costs and enable the description of concurrent reactions from complex fuels containing a multitude a species, a new concept is here proposed that relies on statistical instead of deterministic concepts for modeling chemical kinetics of oxidation reactions. In this new concept, each species has a time scale associated with it, and the goal is to solve only for the significant scales of the problem and model those scales that are not significant. A set of reaction-species mole fractions is considered a vector and the objective is to map this vector into a much smaller multidimensional vector space of base chemical fragments. The goal is to inquire whether such a base can be found for oxidation reactions, and whether one can derive corresponding reaction-coordinate rates for the base that portray the energetics of the system. In essence, there is a functional mapping representing the transformation from the mole fraction PDF of the species to the mole fraction PDF of the base and the interest is not in calculating this functional but its moments (e.g. statistical means, variances, etc.) needed to adequately describe the fragment vector.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADP023628

Entities

People

  • Josette Bellan

Organizations

  • California Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Alkenes
  • Chemical Kinetics
  • Chemistry
  • Combustion
  • Decomposition
  • Free Radicals
  • Heat Capacity
  • Heat Of Formation
  • Jet Propulsion
  • Military Research
  • Molar Heat Capacity
  • Oxidation
  • Scientific Research
  • Technical Information Centers
  • Thermodynamic Properties
  • Vector Spaces

Readers

  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster