Fuel injection model for Euler-Euler and Euler-Lagrange large-eddy simulations of an evaporating spray inside an aeronautical combustor

Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) of an evaporating two-phase flow in an experimental burner are investigated. Two different numerical approaches for the simulation of the dispersed phase are coupled to the same gaseous solver: a mesoscopic Eulerian method and a Lagrangian particle tracking technique. The spray is represented by a single droplet size owing to the locally monodisperse formulation of the employed mesoscopic Eulerian approach. Both approaches use the same drag and evaporation models. They do not take into account the atomization process and a simplified injection model is applied instead. The presented methodology, referred as FIM-UR (Fuel Injection Method by Upstream Reconstruction) defines injection profiles for the monodisperse spray produced by a pressure-swirl atomizer. It is designed so as to ensure similar spray characteristics for both approaches and allows for a direct comparison between them. After a validation of the purely gaseous flow in the burner, liquid-phase dynamics and droplet dispersion are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated for the Eulerian and Lagrangian simulations. Results obtained for both approaches are in very good agreement and compare reasonably with experiments, indicating that simplified injection methods are appropriate for the simulation of realistic combustor geometries. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.