Simulation of the Primary Jet Breakup of Non-Newtonian Fuels: Basic Research for Simulation-Assisted Design of Low-Grade Fuel Burner

Abstract

The research work of the present study is focused on the numerical simulation of primary breakup of high-viscosity non-Newtonian fluids. For the experimental investigation of fluid properties such as viscosity, surface tension and flow behaviour on the jet breakup an external mixing twin-fluid nozzle is used, as investigated in a previous study [Müller et al., ASME Turbo Expo 2016, GT2016-56371]. To describe the disintegration process of the fluids, characteristic features like liquid jet morphology, breakup length, breakup frequency and spray angle are evaluated. Furthermore, the primary breakup of slurries is simulated without discretizing the particles as a third phase, which heavily reduced the computational effort. Instead, the physical properties (density, viscosity) of the liquid phase take the influence of the particles into account. The primary breakup was investigated using the open source CFD software OpenFOAM. To gather the morphology of the primary breakup and the flow field characteristics compressible large eddy simulations (LES) were performed and the movement of the gas-liquid interface was captured by means of the Volume of Fluid-Method (VOF). The conducted simulations showed good agreement with experimental results with respect to the characteristic features (e.g. breakup length) and the significant influence of viscosity and surface tension on the primary breakup. It is reasonably justified that the used OpenFOAM code and VOF is sufficient to simulate the primary breakup of particle laden liquids without discretizing particles as a third phase. Moreover, those findings contribute to a better understanding of the physics responsible of the breakup of high-viscosity liquid jets and as well to create an experimentally validated CFD based tool for future burner development and optimization.