3/9/2018 ANSYS FLUENT 12.0 Theory Guide - 7.1.

1 Species Transport Equations

7.1.1 Species Transport Equations

When you choose to solve conservation equations for chemical species, ANSYS FLUENT predicts the local
mass fraction of each species, , through the solution of a convection-diffusion equation for the th
species. This conservation equation takes the following general form:

(7.1-1)

where is the net rate of production of species by chemical reaction (described later in this section) and
is the rate of creation by addition from the dispersed phase plus any user-defined sources. An equation of

this form will be solved for species where is the total number of fluid phase chemical species
present in the system. Since the mass fraction of the species must sum to unity, the th mass fraction is
determined as one minus the sum of the solved mass fractions. To minimize numerical error, the
th species should be selected as that species with the overall largest mass fraction, such as N when the
oxidizer is air.

Mass Diffusion in Laminar Flows

In Equation 7.1-1, is the diffusion flux of species , which arises due to gradients of concentration and

temperature. By default, ANSYS FLUENT uses the dilute approximation (also called Fick's law) to model
mass diffusion due to concentration gradients, under which the diffusion flux can be written as

(7.1-2)

Here is the mass diffusion coefficient for species in the mixture, and is the thermal (Soret)
diffusion coefficient.

For certain laminar flows, the dilute approximation may not be acceptable, and full multicomponent
diffusion is required. In such cases, the Maxwell-Stefan equations can be solved; see this section in the
separate User's Guide for details.

Mass Diffusion in Turbulent Flows

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In turbulent flows, ANSYS FLUENT computes the mass diffusion in the following form:

(7.1-3)

where is the turbulent Schmidt number ( where is the turbulent viscosity and is the

turbulent diffusivity). The default is 0.7. Note that turbulent diffusion generally overwhelms laminar
diffusion, and the specification of detailed laminar diffusion properties in turbulent flows is generally not
necessary.

Treatment of Species Transport in the Energy Equation

For many multicomponent mixing flows, the transport of enthalpy due to species diffusion

can have a significant effect on the enthalpy field and should not be neglected. In particular, when the Lewis
number

(7.1-4)

for any species is far from unity, neglecting this term can lead to significant errors. ANSYS FLUENT will
include this term by default. In Equation 7.1-4, is the thermal conductivity.

Diffusion at Inlets

For the pressure-based solver in ANSYS FLUENT, the net transport of species at inlets consists of both
convection and diffusion components. (For the density-based solvers, only the convection component is
included.) The convection component is fixed by the inlet species mass fraction specified by you. The
diffusion component, however, depends on the gradient of the computed species field at the inlet. Thus the
diffusion component (and therefore the net inlet transport) is not specified a priori. For information about
specifying the net inlet transport of species, see this section in the separate User's Guide.

Previous: 7.1 Volumetric Reactions

Up: 7.1 Volumetric Reactions
Next: 7.1.2 The Generalized Finite-Rate

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Release 12.0 © ANSYS, Inc. 2009-01-23

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