High-pressure droplet combustion studies

This is a joint research program, pursued by investigators at the University of Tokyo, UCSD, and NASA Lewis Research Center. The focus is on high-pressure combustion of miscible binary fuel droplets. It involves construction of an experimental apparatus in Tokyo, mating of the apparatus to a NASA-Lewis 2.2-second drop-tower frame in San Diego, and performing experiments in the 2.2-second tower in Cleveland, with experimental results analyzed jointly by the Tokyo, UCSD, and NASA investigators. The project was initiated in December, 1990 and has now involved three periods of drop-tower testing by Mikami at Lewis. The research accomplished thus far concerns the combustion of individual fiber-supported droplets of mixtures of n-heptane and n-hexadecane, initially about 1 mm diameter, under free-fall microgravity conditions. Ambient pressures ranged up to 3.0 MPa, extending above the critical pressures of both pure fuels, in room-temperature nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres having oxygen mole fractions X of 0.12 and 0.13. The general objective is to study near-critical and super-critical combustion of these droplets and to see whether three-stage burning, observed at normal gravity, persists at high pressures in microgravity. Results of these investigations will be summarized here; a more complete account soon will be published

A macroscopic model for sessile droplet evaporation on a flat surface

The evaporation of sessile droplets on a flat surface involves a complex interplay between phase change, diffusion, advection and surface forces. In an attempt to significantly reduce the complexity of the problem and to make it manageable, we propose a simple model hinged on a surface free energy-based relaxation dynamics of the droplet shape, a diffusive evaporation model and a contact line pinning mechanism governed by a yield stress. Our model reproduces the known dynamics of droplet shape relaxation and of droplet evaporation, both in the absence and in the presence of contact line pinning. We show that shape relaxation during evaporation significantly affects the lifetime of a drop. We find that the dependence of the evaporation time on the initial contact angle is a function of the competition between the shape relaxation and evaporation, and is strongly affected by any contact line pinning.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

Evaporating pure, binary and ternary droplets: thermal effects and axial symmetry breaking

The Greek aperitif Ouzo is not only famous for its specific anise-flavored taste, but also for its ability to turn from a transparent miscible liquid to a milky-white colored emulsion when water is added. Recently, it has been shown that this so-called Ouzo effect, i.e. the spontaneous emulsification of oil microdroplets, can also be triggered by the preferential evaporation of ethanol in an evaporating sessile Ouzo drop, leading to an amazingly rich drying process with multiple phase transitions [H. Tan et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 113(31) (2016) 8642]. Due to the enhanced evaporation near the contact line, the nucleation of oil droplets starts at the rim which results in an oil ring encircling the drop. Furthermore, the oil droplets are advected through the Ouzo drop by a fast solutal Marangoni flow. In this article, we investigate the evaporation of mixture droplets in more detail, by successively increasing the mixture complexity from pure water over a binary water-ethanol mixture to the ternary Ouzo mixture (water, ethanol and anise oil). In particular, axisymmetric and full three-dimensional finite element method simulations have been performed on these droplets to discuss thermal effects and the complicated flow in the droplet driven by an interplay of preferential evaporation, evaporative cooling and solutal and thermal Marangoni flow. By using image analysis techniques and micro-PIV measurements, we are able to compare the numerically predicted volume evolutions and velocity fields with experimental data. The Ouzo droplet is furthermore investigated by confocal microscopy. It is shown that the oil ring predominantly emerges due to coalescence

Evaporation of a thin droplet on a thin substrate with a high thermal resistance

A mathematical model for the quasi-steady evaporation of a thin liquid droplet on a thin substrate that incorporates the dependence of the saturation concentration of vapour at the free surface of the droplet on temperature is used to examine an atypical situation in which the substrate has a high thermal resistance relative to the droplet (i.e. it is highly insulating and/or is thick relative to the droplet). In this situation diffusion of heat through the substrate is the rate-limiting evaporative process and at leading order the local mass flux is spatially uniform, the total evaporation rate is proportional to the surface area of the droplet, and the droplet is uniformly cooled. In particular, the qualitative differences between the predictions of the present model in this situation and those of the widely used 'basic' model in which the saturation concentration is independent of temperature are highlighted

Assessment of heating and evaporation modelling based on single suspended water droplet experiments

The work described in this paper is undertaken with the purpose of providing a detailed assessment of the current modelling capabilities of the effects of fire suppression systems (e.g., sprinklers) in fire-driven flows. Such assessment will allow identifying key modelling issues and, ultimately, improving the reliability of the numerical tools in fire safety design studies. More specifically, we studied herein the heating and evaporation of a single water droplet. This rather 'simple' configuration represents the first step in a tedious and rigorous verification and validation process, as advocated in the MaCFP (Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena) working group (see https://iafss.org/macfp/). Such a process starts ideally with single-physics 'unit tests' and then more elaborate benchmark cases and sub-systems, before addressing 'real-life' application tests. In this paper, we are considering the recently published comprehensive and well-documented experimental data of Volkov and Strizhak (Applied Thermal Engineering, 2017) where a single suspended water droplet of initial diameter between 2.6 and 3.4 mm is heated up by a convective hot air flow with a velocity between 3 and 4.5 m/s and a temperature between 100 and 800 degrees C. In the present numerical study, 36 experimental tests have been simulated with the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS 6.7.0) as well as with an in-house code. The results show that the droplet lifetime is overpredicted with an overall deviation between 26 and 31%. The deviation in the range 300-800 degrees C is even better, i.e., 5-8%, whilst the cases of 200 and, more so 100 degrees C, showed much stronger deviations. The measured droplet saturation temperatures did not exceed 70 degrees C, even for high air temperatures of around 800 degrees C, whereas the predicted values approached 100 degrees C. A detailed analysis shows that the standard Ranz & Marshall modelling of the non-dimensional Nusselt and Sherwood numbers may not be appropriate in order to obtain a simultaneous good agreement for both the droplet lifetime and temperature. More specifically, the heat-mass transfer analogy (i.e., Nu = Sh) appears to be not always valid

Evaporation and Discharge Dynamics of Highly Charged Multicomponent Droplets Generated by Electrospray Ionization

We investigate the Rayleigh discharge and evaporation dynamics of highly charged two-component droplets consisting principally of methanol with 2-methoxyethanol, tert-butanol, or m-nitrobenzyl alcohol. A phase Doppler anemometer (PDA) characterizes droplets generated by electrospray ionization (ESI) according to size, velocity, and charge as they move through a uniform electric field within an ion mobility spectrometer (IMS). Repeated field reversals result in droplet “ping-pong” through the PDA. This generates individual droplet histories of solvent evaporation behavior and the dynamics of charge loss to progeny droplets during Rayleigh discharge events. On average, methanol droplets discharge at 127% their Rayleigh limit of charge, q_R, and release 25% of the net charge. Charge loss from methanol/2-methoxyethanol droplets behaves similarly to pure 2-methoxyethanol droplets which release ~28% of their net charge. Binary methanol droplets containing up to 50% tert-butanol discharge at a lower percent q_R than pure methanol and release a greater fraction of their net charge. Mixed 99% methanol/1% m-nitrobenzyl alcohol droplets possess discharge characteristics similar to those of methanol. However, droplets of methanol containing 2% m-nitrobenzyl evaporate down to a fixed size and charge that remains constant with no observable discharges. Quasi-steady-state evaporation models accurately describe observed evaporation phenomena in which methanol/tert-butanol droplets evaporate at a rate similar to that of pure methanol and methanol/2-methoxyethanol droplets evaporate at a rate similar to that of 2-methoxyethanol. We compare these results to previous Rayleigh discharge experiments and discuss the implications for binary solvents in electrospray mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) and field-induced droplet ionization mass spectrometry (FIDI-MS)

High-yield fabrication of entangled photon emitters for hybrid quantum networking using high-temperature droplet epitaxy

Several semiconductor quantum dot techniques have been investigated for the generation of entangled photon pairs. Among the other techniques, droplet epitaxy enables the control of the shape, size, density, and emission wavelength of the quantum emitters. However, the fraction of the entanglement-ready quantum dots that can be fabricated with this method is still limited to around 5%, and matching the energy of the entangled photons to atomic transitions (a promising route towards quantum networking) remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we overcome these obstacles by introducing a modified approach to droplet epitaxy on a high symmetry (111)A substrate, where the fundamental crystallization step is performed at a significantly higher temperature as compared to previous reports. Our method drastically improves the yield of entanglement-ready photon sources near the emission wavelength of interest, which can be as high as 95% due to the low values of fine structure splitting and radiative lifetime, together with the reduced exciton dephasing offered by the choice of GaAs/AlGaAs materials. The quantum dots are designed to emit in the operating spectral region of Rb-based slow-light media, providing a viable technology for quantum repeater stations.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure