Numerical Investigation on the Effect of Advanced Breakup Model on Spray Simulation of a Multi-Hole Injector

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) plays a tremendous role in evaluating and visualizing the spray breakup, atomization and vaporization process. In this study, ANSYS Forte CFD tool was used to simulate the spray penetration length and spray morphology in a constant volume chamber at different grid size of a multi-hole injector. An unsteady gas jet model was coupled with Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) and Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) model for multi-hole spray simulation. The effect of CFD cell size and ambient gas pressure on spray penetration length and spray morphology of fuel vapor mass fraction were investigated for both KH-RT and KH-RT with the unsteady gas jet model. It is found that KH-RT with the unsteady gas jet model shows mesh independent spray penetration length and spray morphology of fuel vapor mass fraction as compared to KH-RT model. This can be explained by the Lagrangian-Eulerian coupling of axial droplet-gas relative velocity is modeled on the principle of unsteady gas jet theory instead of discretizing very fine grid to the computational domain. This reduces the requirement of fine mesh near the nozzle and allows larger time step during spray injection. It is also observed that at higher ambient gas pressure, an aerodynamic force between the droplet and gas intensifies which reduces the overall spray penetration length and fuel vapor mass. The distorted spray morphology of fuel vapor mass fraction was accurately predicted at high ambient gas pressure using the KH-RT with an unsteady gas jet model which results in mesh independent drag predictions. The use of advanced spray model results in the mesh size dependency reduction and accurate drag prediction with less computational time and faster accurate solutions over all conventional spray breakup models.