Suraj Deshpande

Distinguishing features of shallow angle plunging jets

Numerical simulations employing an algebraic volume-of-fluid methodology are used to study the air entrainment characteristics of a water jet plunging into a quiescent water pool at angles ranging from θ = 10° to θ = 90° measured from the horizontal. Our previous study of shallow angled jets [S. S. Deshpande, M. F. Trujillo, X. Wu, and G. L. Chahine, “Computational and experimental characterization of a liquid jet plunging into a quiescent pool at shallow inclination,” Int. J. Heat Fluid Flow 34, 1–14 (2012)]10.1016/j.ijheatfluidflow.2012.01.011 revealed the existence of a clearly discernible frequency of ingestion of large air cavities. This is in contrast with chaotic entrainment of small air pockets reported in the literature in case of steeper or vertically plunging jets. In the present work, the differences are addressed by first quantifying the cavity size and entrained air volumes for different impingement angles. The results support the expected trend – reduction in cavity size (D43) as θ is incre...

A computational study of an atomizing liquid sheet

Linear instability predictions of liquid sheets injected into a gas medium are well established in the literature. These analyses are often used in Lagrangian-Eulerian spray simulations, a prominent simulation method, to model the dynamics occurring in the near-nozzle region. In the present work, these instability predictions are re-examined by first generalizing the treatment of interfacial conditions and related assumptions with a two-phase Orr-Sommerfeld (OS) system, and second, by employing highly resolved-Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) simulations. After presenting some validation exercises for both the VoF and OS solvers, the OS predictions are compared to earlier studies from the literature leading to reasonable agreement in the limit as the boundary layer thickness tends to zero. Results from VoF simulations of liquid sheet injection are used to characterize the range of scales of the liquid structures immediately before atomization. The mean value in this range is found to be approximately two to three orders of magnitude larger than the corresponding predictions from previous studies. A two-phase mixing layer under the same physical conditions is used to examine this disparity, revealing that within the linear regime, relatively good agreement exists between the VoF and OS predicted instability mechanisms. However, the most unstable mode in the linear regime is too small to cause a fracture or atomization of the liquid sheet and hence cannot be directly responsible for the atomization. The generation of a much larger mode, which emerges well beyond the linear regime, is the one causing breakup.