Numerical and experimental studies of liquid breakup at the surface of turbulent jets

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Primary breakup can be regarded as one of the least developed model components for simulating and predicting liquid jet breakup. This paper presents a numerical investigation of primary breakup of a planar turbulent liquid jet in still air at standard conditions for jet exit Reynolds numbers of 10000 and 23000 and Weber number is varied within the range [102–107]. Due to the limitation of direct numerical simulation (DNS) to moderate Reynolds numbers, the one-dimensional turbulence (ODT) model is used to simulate the jet with high lateral resolution. ODT permits affordable high resolution of interfaces and single-phase property gradients which are essential for capturing the local behavior of the breakup process. ODT is a stochastic model simulating turbulent flow evolution along a notional 1D line of sight by applying instantaneous maps to represent the effect of individual turbulent eddies on property profiles. ODT has recently been used by the authors to reproduce the main features of an experimentally determined regime diagram for primary jet breakup. In this study we apply the model to the high Re number regime and compare to new experimental data.