Using a mixture of water and diesel fuel is considered a way to reduce gas emissions including NOx and COx in the gas turbine. This paper presents experimental results on spray characteristics of the water-diesel fuel mixture in an air crossflow. A plain-orifice type injector of 0.508 mm in diameter is employed in the research. Pure water, pure diesel fuel, and water-diesel fuel mixtures with different mixing ratios are used to compare their spray characteristics. In order to observe spray behaviors in different breakup regimes, Weber numbers for water of 30 and 125 are chosen as the operating condition and the corresponding Weber numbers for diesel fuel at the same conditions are 92 and 382, respectively. Momentum flux ratios are 10 and 20. A tee connection and a subsequent static mixer are employed at upstream of fuel injector to mix two liquids. Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA) measurement is performed to measure droplet distributions and mean drop size at various mixture ratios, and planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique with dyeing either diesel or water is used to look into the primary breakup process. PDPA data show that the spray characteristics of water-diesel fuel mixtures such as mean drop size and number density distribution can be predicted from the measured drop size distribution of pure fluids by weighting those quantities by mass fraction of each fluid, indicating that the water and diesel are injected alternately without significant mixing between the two fluids. A short transition of liquid flow from water-to-diesel or diesel-to-water produces small fraction of relatively bigger droplets.
Characteristics of Droplet Formation Between Diesel Fuel, Emulsion and Pure Water
