Atomization and Sprays Journal of the International Institutes for Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems

ISSN for PRINT: 1045-5110

For Online Access

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1991, Volume1

Issue 4

132 pages

Issue price - $75.00

K. Harstad
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA

Josette Bellan
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

A formulation has been developed to describe the evaporation of dense or dilute clusters of binary-fuel drops. The binary fuel is assumed to be made of a solute and a solvent whose volatility is much lower than that of the solute. Convective flow effects, inducing a circulatory motion inside the drops, are taken into account, as well as turbulence external to the cluster volume. Results obtained with this model show that, similar to the conclusions for single, isolated drops, the evaporation of the volatile is controlled by liquid mass diffusion when the cluster is dilute. In contrast, when the cluster is dense, the evaporation of the volatile is controlled by surface layer stripping, that is, by the regression rate of the drop, which is, in fact, controlled by the evaporation rate of the solvent. These conclusions are in agreement with existing experimental observations. Parametric studies show that these conclusions remain valid with changes in ambient temperature, initial slip velocity between drops and gas, initial drop size, initial cluster size, initial liquid mass fraction of the solute, and various combinations of solvent and solute. The implications of these results for computationally intensive combustor calculations are discussed.

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