Simulation of the compressible flow with mass transfer of semi-continuous mixtures using the direct quadrature method of moments

•The QMoM for continuous thermodynamics was extended to field problems (called DQMoM).•DQMoM was applied to the flow of a semi-continuous compressible mixture.•The continuous component is adaptively characterized at each point in the domain.•Good accuracy of DQMoM was obtained with just a few pseudocomponents.•DQMOM was two times faster than conventional method.

We developed a method for the solution of the compressible flow with mass transfer of semi-continuous mixtures and it is based on the quadrature method of moments (QMoM) for continuous thermodynamics. The method extends the adaptive characterization of the continuous mixture to field problems and solves the mass transport equation for the continuous component. The method is referred as direct QMoM, or DQMoM, for continuous thermodynamics. It was implemented in the OpenFOAM® as a compressible ideal gas flow solver. The DQMoM was applied to the mixing flow of two gas streams with different compositions of a mixture with 57 hydrocarbons diluted in nitrogen. We showed that 4 adaptive components reproduced the mixture properties within 3% accuracy. Furthermore, the DQMoM CFD solution was approximately two times faster than the solution using 58 discrete components.