EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON EVAPORATION OF KEROSENE DROPLETS AT ELEVATED PRESSURES AND TEMPERATURES

Abstract

Kerosene is a common liquid fuel in many industrial applications. However, there is little useful data on high pressure and high temperature evaporation for kerosene. In this research, the vaporization of kerosene droplet was experimentally investigated at high temperatures (between 500 and 1000°C) and high pressures (between 0.1 and 3.0 MPa) under normal gravity. High temperature environment has provided by a furnace. Droplet with initial diameter between 1.0 and 1.2 mm was suspended at the tip of a quartz fiber. The evaporation process was recorded by a high-speed CCD camera. The evaporation rate was extracted from the recorded movie by determining temporal rate of changing of droplet diameter. Despite its multicomponent nature, the evaporation of kerosene droplet followed the d ² -law after heating-up period. The evaporation rate of kerosene droplet increased monotonically with an increase in gas temperature. At low temperature, when ambient pressure increased, the evaporation rate also increased. But at high temperature, evaporation rate shows a maximum around 2.0 MPa and then decreases. Also, the formation of dense fuel vapor cloud around the droplet was observed under conditions with higher evaporating rate.

Keywords:

• evaporation
• kerosene
• liquid droplets
• single droplet

Acknowledgments

The present work was supported by the Combustion Engineering Research Center at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which is funded by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation. The first author wishes to thank Dr. M. Golafshani for his valuable discussions about high rate evaporation.