High-Fidelity Design Tools and Technologies for High-Pressure Heavy Fuel Injectors

Fuel injection is a strongly multi-physical process, involving the effects of droplet breakup, deformation, atomization, evaporation, turbulence, and non-ideal thermodynamics, among others, not all of which are strictly deterministic at the present time. In the work proposed here, HyPerComp Inc. seeks to transition an advanced high-fidelity simulation software suite (being used extensively in aero-propulsion) to model heavy fuel injectors at high injection pressures. The solver will be built upon a Large Eddy Simulation code written for turbulent combustion. It will deploy a free surface capture method in the vicinity of the injector where the flowfield is dense (i.e., high liquid volume fraction), and couple it to a Lagrangian spray model in the far-field where the flow is dilute. We will augment this code with sub-models for spray properties, leading to a tool capable of modeling primary atomization and jet penetration, as well as dispersion, evaporation and mixing, with particular emphasis on high-pressure injection systems. The staff at HyPerComp Inc. has close to three decades of association with computational fluid dynamics modeling in aeronautical applications. HyPerComp will work jointly in this project with Prof. Suresh Menon of the Computational Combustion Laboratory (CCL) at the Georgia Institute of Technology.