Numerical simulation of micron and submicron droplets in jet impinging

Abstract

Micron droplet deposition onto a wall in an impinging jet is important for various applications like spray cooling, coating, fuel injection, and erosion. The impinging process is featured by abrupt velocity changes and thus complicated behaviors of the droplets. Either modeling or experiment for the droplet behaviors is still challenging. This study conducted numerical modeling and compared with an existing experiment in which concentric dual-ring deposition patterns of micron droplets were observed on the impinging plate. The modeling fully took into account of the droplet motion in the turbulent flow, the collision between the droplets and the plate, as well as the collision, that is, agglomeration among droplets. Different turbulence models, that is, the v 2 − f model, standard k–ε model, and Reynolds stress model, were compared. The results show that the k–ε model failed to capture the turbulent flow structures and overpredicted the turbulent fluctuations near the wall. Reynolds stress model had a good performance in flow field simulation but still failed to reproduce the dual-ring deposition pattern. Only the v 2 − f model reproduced the dual-ring pattern when coupled with droplet collision models. The results echoed the excellent performance of the v 2 − f model in the heat transfer calculation for the impinging problems. The agglomeration among droplets has insignificant influence on the deposition.