A high order moment method simulating evaporation and advection of a polydisperse liquid spray

Abstract

In this paper, we tackle the modeling and numerical simulation of sprays and aerosols, that is dilute gas–droplet flows for which polydispersity description is of paramount importance. Starting from a kinetic description for point particles experiencing transport either at the carrier phase velocity for aerosols or at their own velocity for sprays as well as evaporation, we focus on an Eulerian high order moment method in size and consider a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) on a vector of successive integer size moments of order 0 to N, N > 2, over a compact size interval. There exists a stumbling block for the usual approaches using high order moment methods resolved with high order finite volume methods: the transport algorithm does not preserve the moment space. Indeed, reconstruction of moments by polynomials inside computational cells coupled to the evolution algorithm can create N-dimensional vectors which fail to be moment vectors: it is impossible to find a size distribution for which there are the moments. We thus propose a new approach as well as an algorithm which is second order in space and time with very limited numerical diffusion and allows to accurately describe the advection process and naturally preserves the moment space. The algorithm also leads to a natural coupling with a recently designed algorithm for evaporation which also preserves the moment space; thus polydispersity is accounted for in the evaporation and advection process, very accurately and at a very reasonable computational cost. These modeling and algorithmic tools are referred to as the Eulerian Multi Size Moment (EMSM) model. We show that such an approach is very competitive compared to multi-fluid approaches, where the size phase space is discretized into several sections and low order moment methods are used in each section, as well as with other existing high order moment methods. An accuracy study assesses the order of the method as well as the low level of numerical diffusion on structured meshes. Whereas the extension to unstructured meshes is provided, we focus in this paper on cartesian meshes and two 2D test-cases are presented: Taylor–Green vortices and turbulent free jets, where the accuracy and efficiency of the approach are assessed.