Effects of evaporation and fuel properties on liquid jets in supersonic crossflow: A computational study using a compressible eulerian-lagrangian solver

Due to the longer auto-ignition time with liquid fuels compared with hydrogen, understanding the interaction of shock waves with sprays and subsequent vapor mixing is significant for designing ramjets/scramjets with liquid fuel sprays. A Eulerian–Lagrangian framework was developed based on the OpenFOAM platform. In this solver, detailed multicomponent transport models for Eulerian gas-phase species properties were included. Lagrangian spray break-up, atomization, and evaporation models were added to simulate liquid phase, and an equilibrium wall function was added to model the near-wall properties. The newly developed solver was applied to conduct large eddy simulations on nonreactive liquid jets in supersonic crossflow with liquid sprays. The liquid penetration length was compared with the experimental data, showing a very good agreement. Effects of evaporation and fuel properties (e.g., heat capacity and enthalpy of evaporation) on penetration length, temperature, Sauter mean diameter, and volumetric parcel flux are considered. Evaporation effects primarily showed up in the temperature field. For n-heptane sprays, such impact could be conducted to other properties of the flow field, i.e., spray plume size, particle size distribution, and volumetric flux, which is caused by the smaller enthalpy of evaporation and heat capacity compared to water.