THE FULLY LAGRANGIAN APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF PARTICLE/DROPLET DYNAMICS: IMPLEMENTATION INTO ANSYS FLUENT AND APPLICATION TO GASOLINE SPRAYS

The fully Lagrangian approach (FLA) to the calculation of the number density of inertial particles in dilute gas-particle flows is implemented into the CFD code ANSYS Fluent. The new version of ANSYS Fluent is applied to modeling dilute gas-particle flow around a cylinder and liquid droplets in a gasoline fuel spray. In a steady-state case, the predictions of the FLA for the flow around a cylinder and those based on the equilibrium Eulerian method (EE) are almost identical for small Stokes number, Stk, and small Reynolds number, Re, (Re = 1, Stk = 0.05). For the larger values of these numbers (Re = 10, 100; Stk = 0.1, 0.2) the FLA predicts higher values of the gradients of particle number densities in front of the cylinder compared with the ones predicted by the EE. For transient flows (Re = 200), both methods predict high values of the number densities between the regions of high vorticity and very low values in the vortex cores. For Stk ≥ 0.1 the maximal values predicted by FLA are shown to be several orders of magnitude higher than those predicted by the EE. An application of FLA to a direct injection gasoline fuel spray has focused on the calculation of the number densities of droplets. Results show good qualitative agreement between the numerical simulation and experimental observations. It is shown that small droplets with diameters dp = 2 μm tend to accumulate in the regions of trajectory intersections more readily, when compared with larger droplets (dp = 10 μm, dp = 20 μm). This leads to the prediction of the regions of high number densities of small droplets.