The accurate simulation of the dynamics of polydisperse evaporating sprays in unsteady gaseous flows with large scale vortical structures is both a crucial issue for industrial applications and a challenge for modeling and scientific computing. The difficulties encountered by the usual Lagrangian approaches make the use of Eulerian models attractive, aiming at a lower cost and an easier coupling with the carrier gaseous phase. Among these models, the multi-fluid model allows the detailed description of polydispersity and size/velocity correlations for droplets of various sizes. The purpose of the present study is two-fold. First, we extend the multi-fluid model in order to cope with droplet trajectory crossings by using the quadrature method of moments in velocity phase space conditioned by size. We identify the numerical difficulties and provide dedicated numerical schemes in order to preserve the velocity moment space. Second, we conduct a comparison study and demonstrate the capability of such an approach to capture the dynamics of an evaporating polydisperse spray in a two-dimensional free jet configuration. We evaluate the accuracy and computational cost of Eulerian models and related discretization schemes versus Lagrangian solvers. It shows that, even for finite Stokes number, the standard Eulerian multi-fluid model is accurate at reasonable cost.
Dilute liquid sprays can be modeled at the mesoscale using a kinetic equation, namely the Williams-Boltzmann equation, containing terms for spatial transport, evaporation and fluid drag. The most common method for simulating the Williams-Boltzmann equation uses Lagrangian particle tracking wherein a finite ensemble of numerical "parcels" provides a statistical estimate of the joint surface area, velocity number density function (NDF). An alternative approach is to discretize the NDF into droplet size intervals, called sections, and to neglect velocity fluctuations conditioned on droplet size, resulting in an Eulerian multi-fluid model. In comparison to Lagrangian particle tracking, multi-fluid models contain no statistical error (due to the finite number of parcels) but they cannot reproduce the particle trajectory crossings observed in Lagrangian simulations of non-collisional kinetic equations. Here, in order to overcome this limitation, a quadrature-based moment method is used to describe the velocity moments. When coupled with the sectional description of droplet sizes, the resulting Eulerian multi-fluid, multi-velocity model is shown to capture accurately both particle trajectory crossings and the size-dependent dynamics of evaporation and fluid drag. Model validation is carried out using direct comparisons between the Lagrangian and Eulerian models for an unsteady free-jet configuration with mono-and polydisperse droplets with and without evaporation. Flow Turbulence Combust (2010) 85:649-676 and gas-phase fuel mass fraction fields show excellent agreement, suggesting that the multi-fluid, multi-velocity model is well suited for describing spray combustion.Keywords Dilute polydisperse spray · Williams-Boltzmann equation · Quadrature-based moment methods · Eulerian multi-fluid model · Eulerian multi-velocity model
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