Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering
Abstract
This thesis provides a detailed investigation of turbulent combustion modelling of liquid sprays. Modelling of liquid sprays is a challenging task due to the existence of a wide range of complexities in both liquid and gas phases and their interaction in the spray and combustion process. In such multiphase flow, there is a need to address all physical processes involved in each individual phase and jointly in the interaction of phases. In a multiphase flow, there are physical processes with respect to flow, energy, chemical reactions, and flame propagation. In the liquid phase, the physical processes include dispersion, evaporation, volatile formation and exchange of heat and mass transfer with the gas phase. In the gas phase, there is turbulent flow, mixing and chemical reactions. The model that is derived and validated in this thesis extends the existing capabilities of liquid spray modelling by introducing a novel model for heat and mass transfer in the liquid phase that is coupled with the gas phase simulation. The model is comprised of an Eulerian LES model for the gas phase mass, momentum, and reference mixture fraction, a Lagrangian fuel particle (LFP) model for the dispersion, evaporation, heat and mass transfer and volatile formation, and a second Lagrangian stochastic particle model based on a multiple mapping conditioning (MMC) to represent the turbulent reacting chemistry. This study simulates three experimental validation cases from the University of Sydney combustion lab: non-reacting kerosene, evaporating acetone and reacting acetone. The axial and radial profiles of droplets, gas velocity and gas phase temperature are in good agreement with experimental measurements. Importantly the results of the finite volume and Lagrangian stochastic particle schemes are shown to be consistent with each other
