Experimental study of the injection angle impact on the column Waves: Wavelength, frequency and drop size

Abstract

An experimental study was performed to investigate the influence of injection angle on further details of breakup of a circular liquid jet injected into an airstream. Wavelength and frequency of axial oscillations caused by column waves, drops size distribution, orientation and aspect ratio of these drops were measured and reported. Injection angles between 30 and 90 degrees were considered. High-speed photography and shadowgraphy techniques were utilized to visualize and record the flow. Experimental data were obtained by processing images with the help of an in-house developed code. We found that gas Weber number and the injection angle are influential on wavelength and frequency of the column waves. The wavelength decreased and the frequency increased with increasing gas Weber number or decreasing the injection angle. Also, momentum ratio, gas Weber number and injection angle were affecting drop's average diameter. By reducing the injection angle, the atomization process was prolonged and the produced drops were larger. Although the injection angle affected the average drop size and number, as long as the regime was not changed, the probability distribution of drop size was independent of the injection angle.We extended theory of Ng et al. [1] to estimate wavelength, frequency of column waves formed on the liquid jet that was injected into an airstream to account for injection angle. A relative gas Weber number was defined by using the relative velocity of the gas to that of the liquid along the flow direction. The introduced relative gas Weber number was found useful in classifying the breakup regimes of the flow. A relation was proposed to estimate these wavelengths with good agreement with our data at different injection angles and other previously published data at normal injection of liquid jets. Two separate correlations for SMD estimation were proposed for before and after bag formation in the flow.