CFD Modeling and Simulation of High Speed Reacting Flows

The fundamental laws of the physics of fluid flow in the continuum regime are embedded in a somewhat "simple" set of partial differential equations describing the transport of mass, momentum, energy, and/orentropy. These basic equations can be manipulated to construct other important physical quantities such as vorticity that help further elucidate flow physics. Additionally, these equations can be nondimensionalized to identify important nondimensional groups governing compressible, reacting fluid flows, most prominently Reynolds, Mach, Froude, Prandtl, Lewis, Schmidt, Damkohler, and Zeldovich numbers. In this lecture, we present these governing equations and discuss the significance of the different terms and nondimensional groups. Furthermore, since these equations cannot be solved directly on current supercomputers for turbulent flows at Reynolds numbers of engineering interest, a scale reduction by averaging or filtering is introduced, which leads to a "closure" problem. The closure is then provided by introducing some common models. The current introduction is by no means complete, but it and the references herein may serve as a good starting point for learning about the most common approaches to turbulent reacting flows.