A Stochastic Immersed Model of Breakup Characteristics in Dense Air Atomization Flow Field

Abstract For the low-speed liquid injected into the high-speed strong turbulent gas flow in the same direction, the atomization is a transient-intensive spray, and there are many factors affecting and controlling the atomization. In this paper, the distribution and characteristics of the liquid breakup in the air atomized flow field are analyzed. A stochastic immersed model to simulate the liquid core is developed, in which, the liquid core is regarded as an immersed porous medium with a random structure, and the probability of existence is used to simulate the position of the liquid core. The initial fragmentation mechanism of the air blast atomization is applied as the global variables of the stochastic process. Using the above stochastic immersed model, combined with the Large Eddy Simulation method, the numerical simulation of the downstream flow field of a coaxial jet air atomizing nozzle is carried out. Additional force is added to the momentum equation in the LES model. Instantaneous air velocity at the air-liquid interface is characterized by instantaneous liquid phase velocity at the same time. The size of the initial atomized droplet satisfies a probability distribution, and once the large droplets are formed, the Lagrangian method is used to track the droplets. The comparison between the simulation results and the experimental results shows that this stochastic immersed model can quickly capture the information of length and position of the liquid nucleus. When the gas-liquid momentum ratio M is 3∼10000, the liquid core length can be predicted more accurately. When M>10, the prediction result is much better than phenomenological model. This model is capable of capturing flow field structures such as recirculation zones and large-scale vortices. The results of initial spray angle from experiment expression give slightly better agreement with this model. Increasing the momentum ratio leads to decreasing of the initial spray angle. The particle size of the droplets near the nozzle can be accurately predicted, especially when the gas velocity is large (bigger than 60 m/s), and the average diameter prediction error of the droplets is less than 10%.