Mechanistic Model for Atomization of Superheated Liquid Jet Fuel

As air-breathing combustion applications advance, increased use of fuel for cooling, combined with cycle advancements, leads to a situation where the fuel can become superheated. While this can lead to potential benefit in terms of the eventual fuel injection process, with enhanced atomization and evaporation, it creates a significant challenge relative design of a system to successfully exploit this behavior. Further, existing computational design tools have not be sufficiently validated to predict the behavior of superheated liquids. Dealing with the superheat behavior in the injection of a liquid fuel requires substantially more physical phenomena to be accounted for compared to a subcooled system. As a result, detailed data and models for this behavior as encountered in practical fuels are needed in order to validate and evolve the models needed. In the work proposed, emphasis will be given to the injection of a plain liquid jet under superheated conditions. Building from the successful Phase I effort, the behavior of internal liquid and external spray in both quiescent and heated crossflow environments will be studied. The models evolved will be incorporated into an existing simulation environment developed by ERC for atomization of liquid jets. In addition, data will be available for CFD validation.