Two-phase characterization for turbulent dispersion of sprays: A review of optical techniques

In liquid-fueled combustion, the interaction of spray droplets with surrounding turbulent air flow is crucial since it influences the evaporation rate of the fuel droplets and the process of air and fuel vapor mixture preparation. For detail understanding on the droplet-turbulence interaction mechanisms as well as to validate numerical simulations of sprays, simultaneous measurement of both dispersed and carrier phases of the spray is essential. This way the vortical interaction of droplets can be fully characterized such that important issues such as local spray unsteadiness and spatiotemporal inhomogeneity of droplet concentration due to droplet clustering and group evaporation of droplets can be addressed. This review focuses on the advances in the optical diagnostics (especially the planar techniques) in the last few decades to meet these requirements. Due to broad size and velocity distributions of spray droplets, the application of the two-phase measurement techniques to sprays encounters challenges especially in phase discrimination. Additionally, for sprays, it is not sufficient to simultaneously measure two-phase velocities but the droplet size is also important since the dynamic drag on droplets is according to their size and velocity relative to the surrounding gas flow. The techniques with such capability are explored. The sources of uncertainty and advantages and limitations of different two-phase measurement approaches are analyzed according to their application to dense and dilute sprays