Citation
Urzay, J. and Martínez- Ruiz, D. and Sánchez, A.L. and Liñán Martínez, Amable and Williams, F.A.
(2013).
Flamelet structures in spray ignition.
"Nasa-Stanford Annual Reserach Briefs"
;
pp. 107-122.
Abstract
In typical liquid-fueled burners the fuel is injected as a high-velocity liquid jet that breaks up to form the spray. The initial heating and vaporization of the liquid fuel
rely on the relatively large temperatures of the sourrounding gas, which may include hot combustion products and preheated air. The heat exchange between the liquid and the gas phases is enhanced by droplet dispersion arising from the turbulent motion. Chemical reaction takes place once molecular mixing between the fuel vapor and the oxidizer has occurred in mixing layers separating the spray flow from the hot air stream. Since in most applications the injection velocities are much larger than the premixed-flame propagation velocity, combustion stabilization relies on autoignition of the fuel-oxygen
mixture, with the combustion stand-off distance being controlled by the interaction of turbulent transport, droplet heating and vaporization, and gas-phase chemical reactions. In this study, conditions are identified under which analyses of laminar flamelets canshed light on aspects of turbulent spray ignition. This study extends earlier fundamental work by Liñan & Crespo (1976) on ignition in gaseous mixing layers to ignition of sprays.
Studies of laminar mixing layers have been found to be instrumental in developing un-derstanding of turbulent combustion (Peters 2000), including the ignition of turbulent gaseous diffusion flames (Mastorakos 2009). For the spray problem at hand, the configuration selected, shown in Figure 1, involves a coflow mixing layer formed between a stream of hot air moving at velocity UA and a monodisperse spray moving at velocity USUA. The boundary-layer approximation will be used below to describe the resulting sl
ender
flow, which exhibits different igniting behaviors depending on the characteristics of t
he
fuel. In this approximation, consideration of the case
U
A
=
U
S
enables laminar ignition
distances to be related to ignition times of unstrained spray flamelets, thereby pro
viding
quantitative information of direct applicability in regions of low scala
r dissipation-rate
in turbulent reactive flows (see the discussion in pp. 181–186 of Peters (2000))
.
This report is organized as follows. Effects of droplet dispersion dynamics on
ignition of
sprays in turbulent mixing layers are discussed in Section 2. The formulation f
or ignition
in laminar mixing layers is outlined in Sections 3 and 4. The results are presented
in
Section 5. In Section 6, the mixture-fraction field and associated scalar dissipat
ion rates
for spray ignition are discussed. Finally, some brief conclusions are drawn in
Section 7.