Nowadays, environmental and economic constraints force the car manufacturers to reduce the consumption and the pollutant emissions of Diesel engines. To improve these engines, it is necessary to precisely understand the physical phenomena that occur in the combustion chamber and more specifically the injection process. A way of analysis and optimization is the numerical simulation and the modeling. After having detailed the physical characteristics of the sprays, the existing models for the atomization process and their limitations, an innovating model is presented: the ELSA model (for Eulerian - Lagrangian Spray Atomization). It takes into account the flow in the dense zone of the spray and deals with the atomization phenomenon from inside...