Numerical investigation of methanol bluff-body flame using variants of RANS turbulence models with conditional moment closure model

In this article, conditional moment closure model (CMC) along with four variants of RANS turbulence models is used for investigating a methanol bluff-body flame. This work attempts to establish the accuracy of turbulence models in predicting the mixing fields, which results in improved predictions of the mean and variance of mixture fraction. This ensures an accurate probability density function (pdf) of the mixture fraction field which is used to obtain unconditional quantities from the conditional quantities calculated from CMC closure. The flow and mixing field are calculated using ANSYS Fluent software by incorporating four different turbulence models viz. standard k-ε (SKE), modified k-ε (MKE), RNG k-ε and Reynolds stress turbulence models. Flow field simulations have been coupled with an in-house CMC solver to obtain the mean flame structure. Profiles of mixture fraction showed an excellent agreement with the experimental data when Reynolds stress turbulence model was used. The unconditional mean temperature and species mass fraction obtained from the CMC model shows improved predictions when coupled with the Reynolds stress turbulence models. Because of inaccurate mixing field and hence the pdf predicted from SKE, MKE and RNG k-ε models, the unconditional quantities showed significant deviations from the experimental results.