On the trajectory of nonturbulent liquid jets in subsonic crossflows at different density ratios

Abstract

ABSTRACT Numerical simulations using volume of fluid (VOF) method are performed to study the impact of liquid-to-gas density ratio on the trajectory of nonturbulent liquid jets in gaseous crossflows. In this paper, large eddy simulation (LES) turbulence model is coupled with the VOF method to describe the turbulence effects accurately. In addition, dynamic adaptive mesh refinement method with two refinement levels is applied to refine the size of the cells located at gas-liquid interface. Density ratio is changed from 10 to 5000 while other nondimensional numbers are kept constant. Large density ratios are considered in this paper since they are common in many practical applications such as solution precursor/suspension plasma sprays. Our simulations show that the penetration height, especially in the farfield, increases as the density ratio increases. A general correlation for the jet trajectory, which can be used for a wide range of density ratios, is developed based on our simulation results.