Structure and similarity properties of the laminar counterflow spray flame

Abstract

The spray flame in a laminar counterflow is influenced by various setup conditions, for instance the strain rate and liquid droplet parameters, including the initial temperature, size distribution, hydrodynamics and the vaporisation history. With some reasonable simplification, the two phase governing equations can be reformulated as equations in the single gas phase with reconstructed spray-related source terms. Numerical solutions assume interesting similarity features, such as the (almost) independence of the evaporation path after mapping onto a newly defined quantity R, constructed from sensible enthalpy and mixture fraction. In this regard, the dimensionality of free parameters describing the structure of the spray flame can be hopefully reduced, which then provides a different scenario to understand the spray combustion physics. The flame regime diagram is also elaborated in the present framework.

Keywords:

• spray flame
• counterflow
• regime diagram
• R-mapping

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Wenwen Xie (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Dr. Ran Yi (Shanghai JiaoTong) for helpful discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).