LES-CMC of a dilute acetone spray flame

A combined Large-Eddy-Simulation (LES) - Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) method has been applied to model spray combustion. Additional source terms in the CMC transport equation that originate from the evaporation of the fuel have been modelled and their influence on flame structure and global quantities such as temporally averaged temperature profiles has been analysed. The predictions of a laboratory spray jet flame are generally good, the temperature profiles are in good agreement with measurements, and predictions of droplet velocities are satisfactory. The evaporation source term leads to a flux in mixture fraction space and peak temperatures are shifted towards higher mixture fraction regions. The results, however, also highlight some limitations associated with mixture fraction as a single conditioning variable for mixture fraction based approaches if applied to liquid fuel combustion. (C) 2012 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.