Numerical investigation of evaporation and radiation absorption of a non-spherical water droplet under asymmetrically radiative heating

Abstract

A numerical model for evaporation along with internal radiation absorption of a non-spherical droplet is presented. In this model, the VOF method is utilized to trace the interface and the radiative transfer is taken into account by using the Monte Carlo method combined with a contour based interface reconstruction algorithm. Meanwhile, the dynamic mesh technique is applied to increase the computational efficiency. The validated model is used to investigate the radiation absorption inside prolate and oblate water droplets under infrared laser irradiation, and a parametric study for the effects of droplet’s shape and size is presented. The results reveal that the shape of droplet dominates the spectral absorptance when the droplet’s optical thickness is small, but for optically thick droplets, the radiation absorption turns to be dominated by the spectral reflectivity of the irradiated surface. For a deformable droplet under asymmetrically radiative heating, the incident radiation can significantly enhance the heat transfer and evaporation processes. In addition, the assumption of uniform radiation absorption is found to be valid to optical thin droplets, whereas this assumption will underestimate the average interface temperature and evaporation rate of droplets with large optical thickness.