Autoignition of an n-heptane plume in a turbulent coflow of heated air has been studied using the conditional moment closure (CMC) method with a secondorder closure for the conditional chemical source term. Two different methodologies have been considered: (i) the Taylor expansion method, in which the second order correction was based on the solution of the full covariance matrix for the 31 reactive species in the chemical mechanism and hence was not limited to a few selected reactions, and (ii) the conditional PDF method, in which only the temperature conditional variance equation has been solved and its PDF assumed to be a β-function. The results compare favorably with experiment in terms of autoignition location. The structure of the reaction zone in mixture fraction space has been explored. The relative performance of the two methodologies is discussed.

Simulations of turbulent CH 4 -air counterflow flames are presented, obtained in terms of zero and two-dimensional first-order Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) to study the flame structure and extinction limits. The CMC equation with detailed chemistry is solved without the need for operator splitting, while the accompanying flow field is determined using a commercial CFD software employing a Reynolds stress turbulence model and additional transport equations for the turbulent scalar flux and for the mean scalar dissipation rate. Two detailed chemical mechanisms and different conditional scalar dissipation rate models have been examined and small differences were found.The first-order CMC captures the overall structure of the counterflow flame accurately for the unconditional averages. The calculated conditional averages behave as if the scalar dissipation rate were under-predicted, although a comparison with measurement of the conditional scalar dissipation rate is reasonable. The calculated extinction velocity is found to be much higher than the experimental value, but the trend of increasing extinction velocity with air dilution of the fuel stream is captured well. The discrepancies with the data are mostly attributed to the neglect of conditional fluctuations.