Effects of operator nonlocality on closures for multicomponent reactive flows based on dispersion analysis

Abstract

Algebraic closure models with spatially nonlocal operators that are associated with both unresolved advective transport and nonlinear reaction terms in a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes context are presented in this work. In particular, a system of two species subject to binary reaction and transport by advection and diffusion are examined by expanding upon analysis originally developed for binary reactions in the context of Taylor dispersion of scalars. This work extends model forms from weakly-nonlinear extensions of that dispersion theory and the role of nonlocality in the presence of reactions is studied and captured by analytic expressions. These expressions can be incorporated into an eddy diffusivity matrix that explicitly capture the influence of chemical kinetics and flow conditions on the closure operators and we demonstrate that the model form derived in a laminar context can be directly translated to an analogous setup in homogeneous isotropic turbulence, which has implications as a subgrid scale model. We show that this framework can improve prediction of mean quantities compared to previous purely local results, but does not fully close unresolved terms.