Statistical modelling of spray breakup processes in industrial gas-liquid flows

Paper in proceedings, 2015

Sprays are used in industrial applications where high heat and mass transfer rates and good mixing are of primary importance. Today, there is no single mathematical framework available to predict the entire spray breakup process at an acceptable computational cost for a typical problem of industrial size. In this work, we develop a volume-of-fluid (VOF) framework that is combined with Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT) to take advantage of the respective strengths of these two approaches in the dense and dilute regions of the spray. A statistical model is constructed that makes the transition from the VOF to the LPT formulation possible using input data about the primary breakup process obtained from detailed VOF simulations. A novel void-handling scheme is used to make volume conservation possible for the two approaches combined on a single computational mesh. Some examples of the procedure in which the statistical model is tuned are shown and results from the combined framework are presented.