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NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF TWIN FLUID FLOW BLURRING ATOMIZATION

CONCEPT USING LARGE EDDY SIMULAITON

Conference Paper · January 2018

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Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environmental Challenges (SEEC-2018)
NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF TWIN FLUID FLOW BLURRING ATOMIZATION CONCEPT USING
LARGE EDDY SIMULAITON
Raju M
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
Email: me14resch11006@iith.ac.in
ABSTRACT
Atomization process is about converting volume of
fluid into a multiplicity of small droplets, and twin fluid
atomizers are more efficient in this aspect if the
uninterrupted fluid flows are involved. The present
numerical study is focusing on atomization of liquids
(ethanol and water) by air with flow blurring injector at
air to liquid ratio by mass of 2. The numerical simulation
was carried out with commercial solver Ansys Fluent by
using multiphase volume of fluid method (VOF) with large
eddy simulation(LES). The uniform grid of minimum cell
size of 2.5 micron was chosen after grid analysis of
different sizes. The difference in air penetration length in
the fuel tube, drop size distributions was observed through
the numerical simulations for ethanol and water.
Keywords: Flow Blurring Atomizer, ALR ratio, Spray,
LES-VOF.
NOMENCLATURE
ALR Air to Liquid Ratio
CFL Courant-Friedrich-Lewy number
LES Large Eddy Simulation
FB Flow Blurring
VOF Volume of Fluid
01 Jan – 03, January, 2018, IISc, India
Track No.2
SEEC-2018-126
Pankaj S Kolhe
Department of Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology,
Hyderabad
Email: psk@iith.ac.in
INTRODUCTION
In order to reduce the environmental pollutions and to
find the alternative solutions to the fossil fuels, research is
going around the world. The major source of energy in the
world is from different combustion process by using liquid,
solid and gaseous fuels. Researchers find the biomass
energy in the world such as Ethanol, plant oils, etc. as
alternative liquid fuels for future [1]. The literature for
spray characterization of bio-fuels through numerical
analysis is limited. Spray plays an important role in liquid
fuel combustion for stability limits, combustion efficiency,
and pollutant emission levels. “Airblast atomizers” or
“twin fluid atomizer” have many advantages over
“pressure atomizers” or “conventional atomizers” or
“single fluid atomizer” especially in their application to gas
turbine combustion of high pressure ratio [2].
Ganan-Calvo introduced the Flow blurring twin
atomization concept for twin fluid atomization, which has
many advantages over other atomizer such as more
atomization efficiency, uniform drop, and smaller spray
size compared to other conventional atomization concept.
The experimental and numerical analysis for FB
atomization concept are limited.
1
Flow Blurring twin fluid atomization
The configuration of the FB twin fluid atomizer is
as shown in Fig 1, proposed by Ganan-Calvo [3]. In FB
atomization concept the air comes at very high velocity
component in radially inward direction (perpendicular to
designed liquid flow direction) just upstream of injector
dump plane (orifice exit plane), which creates the finer
spray. When the gap (h) between the orifice and liquid
tube is less than quarter of the orifice diameter or internal
diameter of the liquid tube (d), stagnation bubble forms
just upstream of the orifice, which diverts the air flow
backward in the fuel tube as well as through orifice
creating internal and external mixing. Note that, here h/d
and mass flow rate of air dictates the radially inward
component of velocity, responsible for creating the
recirculating bubble region inside liquid tube. Internal
mixing occurs due to the backward air flow, creating
bubbles that burst as they pass through orifice exit leading
to a fine spray. H/d ratio plays an important role as it
controls whether flow focusing or flow blurring
configuration is exhibited. Note that, h/d ratio greater than
0.25 leads to the flow focusing configuration as shown in
Fig 1(a), whereas h/d ratio is less than 0.25 gives the flow
blurring concept as shown in Fig 1(b). The Flow blurring
concept of twin fluid atomization is an example for prompt
atomization as described in reference [4].
FIGURE 1. FLOW BLURRING TWIN FLUID
ATOMIZATION CONCEPT (a) FLOW FOCUSING, (b)
FLOW BLURRING BASED ON h/d RATIO.
Simmons et al [5] carried out the comparative study
between the airblast and flow blurring injectors, and their
results showed that for FB injectors nearly uniform radial
distribution with smaller sauter mean diameter (SMD) is
obtained compared to the airblast injectors, which is very
essential for liquid fuel atomization in combustion systems.
Agrawal and group [5]–[8] as well as Azevedo &
group[9]–[12] have carried out in depth analysis of spray
characterization and its application to combustion systems
for fuel flexibility. The penetration length measurement in
the liquid tube were experimentally carried out by
Agrawal et al [6] to study the effect of ALR on penetration
length and spray quality. The penetration length through
the numerical simulation was studied and reported in
reference [14], but spray characteristics were not studied.
Objective of this study is to look into the impact of
difference in thermos-physical properties of ethanol and
water on spray formation and its statistical description.
Mass flow rates were kept constant for air and liquid at
0.333 gm/s and 0.166 gm/s respectively. Note that orifice
and fuel tube inner diameter is 1.5 mm, and inner and outer
diameter for annular passage for air are 2 mm & 4.5 mm
respectively.
NUMRICAL ANALYSIS
Governing Equation
The interface of the gas and liquid was tracked by
the solution of the continuity equation for the volume
fraction of the phase as shown in Eqn. (1).
1 𝜕(𝛼𝑞 𝜌𝑞 )
[ + ∇. (∝𝑞 𝜌𝑞 ⃗⃗⃗⃗⃗
𝑣𝑞 )
𝜌𝑞 𝜕𝑡
(1)
𝑛
= ∑(𝑚̇𝑝𝑞 − 𝑚̇𝑞𝑝 )]
𝑝=1
Where 𝑚̇ 𝑞𝑝 is the mass transfer from phase q to phase p
and 𝑚̇ 0𝑝𝑞 is the mass transfer from phase p to phase q.
Where volume fraction of all the phases is constrained as,
∑𝑛𝑞=1 ∝𝑞 = 1 (2)
A single momentum equation shown in Eqn. (3) is solved
in the whole flow domain while using VOF model and is
expressed as
𝜕(𝜌𝑉 ⃗)
+ ∇ ∙ (𝜌𝑉⃗ ⃗𝑉)
𝜕𝑡
= −∇𝑝 + ∇ (3)
∙ [𝜇 (∇𝑉 ⃗⃗⃗𝑇 )] + 𝜌𝑔
⃗ + ∇𝑉 ⃗
+ ⃗𝐹
The momentum equation, is dependent on the volume
fractions of all phases through the properties 𝜌 and µ. The
volume fraction equation was solved by explicit time
discretization. Courant-Friedrich Lewy number (CFL)
number plays a very important role in explicit time
discretization for stability condition. The simulations for
this numerical studies were carried out with a CFL number
as 0.25. The time step has adopted based on variable time
stepping method for fixed CFL number. The standard
Smagorinsky-Lilly model is considered for LES.
2
 The geometric reconstruction algorithm, which all the cases. Note that case 4 was used for the final
represents the interface between the two phases using a simulations.
piecewise-linear profile, was used to determine the face
fluxes for the VOF model. It assumes that the interface RESULT AND DISCUSSION
between the two-fluids has a linear slope within each cell
and uses this property to calculate the advection of fluid Numerical Simulations were carried out for ethanol and
through the cell faces using a geometric reconstruction water at atomizing air to liquid ratio of ‘2’ by mass.
scheme. The boundary condition for the numerical
simulations is shown in Fig.3.

FIGURE 2. BOUNDARY CONDITION FOR THE

NUMERICAL SIMULATION

TABLE 1: GRID DETAILS

Minimum Cell FIGURE 4. CONTOUR OF VOLUME OF FLUID
Case Cell Counts size(micron) (A) WATER (B) ETHANOL
1 83408 18.75
9.37 The statistics of the drops on the axisymmetric plane is
2 333632 calculated through image process techniques using Matlab
3 1334528 4.68 Software. The droplet diameters were calculated just 0.375
4 5338112 2.34 mm downstream from the nozzle exit which is highlighted
in red color rectangle in Fig.4(a) and Fig.4(b) zoomed view
as show in Fig 5. The drop size threshold drop diameter is
50 microns. The penetration length in the liquid tube is
less for ethanol compared to water because of difference in
thermo-physical properties and flow velocities. However,
the number of drop are more in ethanol, which can be seen
from the drop statistics shown in Fig.6. This can be
attributed to higher volumetric flow rate for ethanol
compared to water for same ALR where mass flow rate of
air is kept constant.

FIGURE 3. VOLUME OF FLUID FOR WATER AT

DIFFERENT GRID SIZES
The numerical simulation was carried for different
grid cases as shown in Table 1 before finalizing the grid for FIGURE 5. AREA CHOSEN FOR DROPLET
CALCULATION

3

FIGURE 6. DROPLET STATICS FOR WATER AND
ETHANOL
CONCLUSIONS
The main important points from predictions using
numerical simulations are as follows.
 Owing to lower density of ethanol, volumetric flow is
more for same ALR and mass flow rate. Consequently
droplets population density observed is more in case of
ethanol. Besides, lower surface tension for ethanol
allows to form more smaller droplets as observed.
 For same ALR and liquid mass flow rates, momentum
for ethanol is more compared to water and hence
bifurcated air flow penetration in liquid tube is lower
for ethanol.
 Complicated flow recirculation pattern observed
warrants 3D LES simulations, which would make sure
the vorticity estimation is more accurate allowing
precise representation of the flow field just upstream
of orifice exit, which is influencing the spray quality.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the Department of Science
and Technology, India (Grant no ECR/2015/000365). The
authors are grateful to the Ministry of Human Resource
Development (MHRD) for Research fellowship.
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