Numerical simulation of water spray evaporation in a turbulent air flow

Abstract

Water spray evaporation in a hot air flow is a common process for many industrial applications. Spray nozzles should be well adjusted and distributed specifically to achieve efficient evaporation. The present study addressed simulation of the process within the Eulerian-Lagrangian workframe with k-∈ turbulence model. Simulation was carried out via OpenFOAM and postprocessed with ParaView. SprayFOAM solver was used to obtain a solution for 2D and 3D representations of the wind tunnel. Custom JANAF-based approximations were introduced for thermophysical properties of working mediums (air and water vapor). Obtained results were accurate enough to validate the presented model against adopted experimental data. Drift eliminator was modelled with virtual interfaces (baffles), which were tested in two scenarios: accumulating and removing droplets from the computational domain.