Numerical modeling of the secondary droplet break-up in spray flows

The break-up and evaporation of liquid jets is crucial to the efficiency of the combustion process in direct injection engines. Despite its importance, no final consensus concerning the mathematical framework to compute sprays has been reached yet. In the current study we perform simulations of n-dodecane jets with three different models and make comparisons of their predictive capacities. These are the Taylor Analogy Breakup, Reitz-Diwakar and Pilch Erdman models. The values of the model parameters that we use for our simulations are those typically used in the studies of fuel injection in diesel engines. The numerical setup is based on the Engine Combustion Network "Spray A" operating conditions. Due to the high Reynolds numbers of the flow, the motion of the surrounding air is treated numerically via Large Eddy Simulations (LES), whereas the motion of the droplets is tracked in the Lagrangian framework, assuming two-way coupling between the two phases