Liquid jet breakup and spray formation with annular swirl air

Abstract

Spray formation is important for liquid fuel combustion from the perspective of emissions and sustaining combustion. Employing swirl flow increases turbulent intensity, which leads to a much-desired outcome for sprays in a reduction of the jet breakup length, better air-fuel mixing and vaporization characteristics, and stabilizes the combustion operation. The present investigation endeavors to characterize the near field spray developing region of a swirl airblast atomizer. The high-speed digital imaging system is employed to record the unsteady dynamics when the liquid jet breaks to form mono-disperse or poly-disperse drop size distribution depending upon the atomizing air to liquid jet momentum ratio. The coherent spatial nature of the atomization process is identified using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) of acquired high-speed images of the spray in the near field. The simultaneous droplet size and velocities (axial, radial, and tangential) are measured through Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA) technique to quantify the effect of the flow field on spray characteristics in the near field of an atomizer. Joint probability distributions of drop size and velocity along with Weber number distribution provide insight into the spray developing near field region. The spatial variations in the drop size distribution are found to be a function of turbulent Weber number (Wet) and shear Weber number (Wes) distribution. Double Gaussian function representing superimposed distributions for larger and smaller droplets provides the highest confidence fit for both velocity and dropsize distributions throughout the flow field. The volume-averaged statistics are proposed for a better description of the actual spray quality.