Toward Better Modeling of Supercritical Turbulent Mixing

A study was done as part of an effort to develop computational models representing turbulent mixing under thermodynamic supercritical (here, high pressure) conditions. The question was whether the large-eddy simulation (LES) approach, developed previously for atmospheric-pressure compressible-perfect- gas and incompressible flows, can be extended to real-gas non-ideal (including supercritical) fluid mixtures. [In LES, the governing equations are approximated such that the flow field is spatially filtered and sub-grid-scale (SGS) phenomena are represented by models.] The study included analyses of results from direct numerical simulation (DNS) of several such mixing layers based on the Navier-Stokes, total-energy, and conservation-of-chemical-species governing equations.