Eulerian Moment Methods for Automotive Sprays

International audienceTo assist industrial engine design, 3D simulations are increasingly used as they allow evaluation of a wide range of engine configurations and operating conditions and bring a comprehension of the underlying physics comple-mentary to experiments. While the gaseous flow description has reached a certain level of maturity, the multiphase flow description involving the liquid jet fuel injected into the chamber still faces some major challenges. There is a pressing need for a spray model that is time efficient and accurately describes the fuel-particle cloud dynamics downstream of the injector, which is an essential prerequisite for predictive combustion simulations. Due to the highly unsteady nature of the flow following the high-pressure injection process and the complexity of the flow regimes from separated/dense compressible phases to fully developed turbulent spray with evaporating droplets, Eulerian-Eulerian descriptions of two-phase flows are seen as very promising approaches towards realistic and predictive simulations of the mixing process. However they require some effort in terms of physical modeling and numerical analysis related to the more complex mathematical structure of the system of equations and to the unclosed terms appearing in space/time-average equations. Among the various challenges faced, one critical as-pect is to capture spray polydispersity in this framework. A review of recent developments that have permitted key advances in the spray modeling community is proposed in this paper. It is divided into four parts. First, an introduction to automotive spray modeling is provided. Then the formalisms for the description of the disperse region of an engine spray are presented with particular emphasis on the pros and cons of classical Lagrangian par-ticle methods versus Eulerian approaches. The third part presents the motivation for and the recent developments of Eulerian high-order moment methods for size polydispersion. Finally, the extension to fully two-way coupled interactions with the gas phase and the implementation of such methods for variable-geometry applications in CFD codes is described in the fourth part. Using realistic direct injection conditions computed with the IFP-C3D solver, the application and efficiency of Eulerian approaches is illustrated