A Multi-Moment Sectional Method (MMSM) for tracking the soot Number Density Function

A new Multi-Moment Sectional Method (MMSM) is proposed for tracking the evolution of the soot Number Density Function (NDF). Unlike conventional sectional methods, in MMSM, multiple statistical moments are solved within each section, and the size distribution within each section is reconstructed from a polynomial profile or, for the last section, an exponential profile. MMSM can be reduced to a method of moments with a single section to minimize the computational cost and reduced to a sectional method when the number of moments per section is one. The MMSM approach is combined with a detailed univariate soot model and applied to the computation of the soot NDF in an ethylene laminar premixed flame. Compared to a pure sectional method, MMSM is shown to achieve a higher rate of convergence for the predicted total number density and particle size distribution.