Analysis of primary atomization in sprays using direct numerical simulation
- Autores: Marco Crialesi Esposito
- Directores de la Tesis: Francisco Javier Salvador Rubio (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de València ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: José María Desantes Fernández (presid.), Daniel Mira Martínez (secret.), François-Xavier Demoulin (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Sistemas Propulsivos en Medios de Transporte por la Universitat Politècnica de València
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: RiuNet
- Resumen
The understanding of the physical phenomena occurring in the dense region (also known as near field) of atomizing sprays has been long seen as one of the biggest unknown when studying sprays applications. The industrial range of interest goes from nozzles in combustion and propulsion applications to medical sprays, agricultural and food process applications. This substantial lack of knowledge is responsible for some important simplification in modeling, that often result to be inaccurate or simply partial, leading to the evident need of large experimental characterization during the design phase. In fact, the spray breakup and primary atomization processes are indeed fundamental problems of physics, which complexity results from the combination of a multiphase flow in a highly turbulent regime that leads to chaotic scenarios.
The analysis of this problem is extremely problematic, due to a substantial lack of definitive theories about the physical phenomena involved, namely turbulence and atomization. Furthermore, the combination of the multiphase nature of the flow and its turbulent behavior makes substantially difficult to address the problem. Only within the last 10 years, experimental techniques have been capable of visualizing the dense region, but the experiments reliability, analysis and effectiveness in this region still requires vast improvements.
In this scenario, this thesis aims to contribute in the understanding of these physical process and to provide analysis tools for these complex flows. In order to do so, Direct Numerical Simulations have been used for addressing the problem at its smallest scale of motion, while reliably capturing all turbulence scales and breakup events. The multiphase nature of the flow is accounted for by using the Volume of Fluid method.
One of the goal of the thesis was to assess the influence of the inflow boundary conditions on the primary atomization and on the spray's turbulence behavior. In order to do so, two different boundary conditions were used. In a first place, a synthetic inflow boundary condition was used in order to produce a homogeneous turbulence inflow, simulating the nozzle behavior. One of the interesting features of this method was the possibility of tweaking the parameters within the algorithm. In particular, the integral length scale was varied in order to assess the influence of nozzle larger turbulent structures on the primary atomization.
The analysis on the synthetic boundary condition also allowed to optimally design simulations from which derive meaningful turbulence statistics. On this framework, further studies were carried over on the influence of turbulent structures properties, namely homogeneity and anisotropy, on both the flows spectra and droplets statistics. In order to achieve this goal, novel procedures for both computing the flow spectra and analyzing droplets were developed and are carefully addressed in the thesis.
The results of the analysis highlight the independence of droplets statistics from the inflow boundary condition, while, on the other hand, remarking how the total quantity of atomized mass is significantly affected by the turbulence features developed within the nozzle. This considerations are supported by the spectrum analysis performed, which also highlighted how multiphase turbulence shares the universal features described in Kolmogorov theories.
