Study of liquid destabilization and stripping in a liquid-gas mixing layer

International audienceWe study experimentally and analytically the atomization of a liquid sheet by a parallel gas flow, in order to understand the conditions of destabilization of the liquid sheet and the conditions of drop creation. The inviscid stability analysis of the system is carried out with a velocity profile taking into account the wake of the splitter plate (zero speed at the height of the splitter plate): the influence of liquid velocity on the shear instability frequency turns out to be significantly stronger for this type of velocity profile than for classical ones. Frequency measurements carried out by a spectral method show a good agreement with this corrected law. Based on the drop production mechanism proposed in previous studies, we then look via optical probe measurements at the size distribution of the drops produced downstream. The difficulty of these measurements resides in the decrease of the numerical drop flux at low dynamic pressure ratio M. Results obtained for the mean chord are consistent with previous studies. Diameter distributions can be obtained from chord distributions with a numerical conversion procedure, and confronted to expected distributions