ATOMIZATION AND BREAKUP OF LIQUID KEROSENE AT ELEVATED PRESSURE

The robust conservative level-set (RCLS) interface-capturing method was evaluated at conditions relevant to the atomization of liquid kerosene in jet engines at elevated ambient pressure and temperature. The RCLS method is associated with an arbitrarily high-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme to solve the transport equation for the level-set variable, together with an algorithm to capture and extract droplets. This ensures that droplets can make the transition from the Eulerian modeling framework to a Lagrangian formulation, enabling the evaluation of droplet field characteristics such as diameter, velocity, or mass. The many hydrodynamic instabilities arising are captured with useful accuracy while making an efficient use of grid cells, and are found to compare well qualitatively with the available experimental data. The results highlighted the ability of the approach to allow for a statistical analysis of the emerging spray in a cost-effective manner.