Modelling spray performance of alternative aviation fuel

Abstract

Aviation alternative fuels are becoming the inevitable choice of aviation industry under the background of global environmental protection. Fuel droplets with small size and high velocity can lead to an efficient combustion and reduce pollutant emission. A numerical investigation of Fischer-tropsch (FT) alternative jet fuel injected from a pressure swirl atomizer is conducted by using Ansys Fluent where a 3-D geometry of the atomizer nozzle and the external spray domain are prepared in Solidwork. Phase Dopler Anemometry (PDA) measurements on Chinese jet fuel (RP-3) and FT fuel are conveyed to validate the spray characteristics collected numerically. Small droplets are generally located inside the spray core region and in the spray periphery but can also be found in the central region at high pressure. The droplets with the highest SMD are being formed in the outer spray region and both FT and RP-3 show a higher droplets velocity in the nozzle exit region. It has been observed that the SMD decreases with increase in injection pressure and that using the SSD model provide results in agreement with the experimental ones. It is also proved that computational simulation performed on alternative fuel by using an unsteady RANS in the Euler-Lagrangian frame can precisely predict the spray atomization process.