A numerical study of the impacts of volatile component blending on diesel spray evaporation and combustion.

A multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code is used to simulate the evaporation and combustion processes of a diesel spray blended with a highly volatile component. The CFD code uses an Eulerian approach to model the liquid phase of diesel fuel with components of different boiling temperatures. The approach divides the droplets into size groups and assigns different boiling temperatures for each group. The CFD code accounts for liquid droplet flow, turbulent mixing, interfacial drag and heat transfer, droplet evaporation and combustion, radiation heat transfer, and pollutant kinetics. Using the code, a parametric study was conducted to investigate the impacts of a volatile component on the spray evaporation and combustion characteristics. The results indicate that the blending of a highly volatile component can have an impact on droplet evaporation rate and that thermal radiation is significant in spray combustion due to the formation of soot