Development of liquid jet atomization and breakup models including turbulence effects

Recent experimental investigations and physical modeling studies have indicated that turbulence behaviors within a liquid jet have considerable effects on the atomization process. This study aims to model the turbulence effect in the atomization process of a cylindrical liquidjet. Two widely used models, the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability of Reitz [8] (the blob model) and the Taylor-Analogy-Breakup (TAB) secondary droplet breakup by O'Rourke and Amsden [9], are further extended to include turbulence effects. In the primary break-tip model, the level of the turbulence effect on the liquid breakup depends on the characteristic scales and the initial flow conditions. For the secondary breakup, an additional turbulence force, acted on parent drops, is modeled and integrated into the TAB governing equation. The drop size formed from this break-zip regime is estimated based on the energy balance before and after the breakup occurrence. This article describes theoretical development and assessment of the current models, called T-blob and T-TAB, for primary and secondary breakup, respectively.