Numerical investigation of the spray–mesh–turbulence interactions for high-pressure, evaporating sprays at engine conditions

This work presents a numerical methodology to simulate evaporating, high pressure Diesel sprays using the Eulerian–Lagrangian approach. Specific sub-models were developed to describe the liquid spray injection and breakup, and the influence of the liquid jet on the turbulence viscosity in the vicinity of the nozzle. To reduce the computational time and easily solve the problem of the grid dependency, the possibility to dynamically refine the grid where the fuel–air mixing process takes place was also included. The validity of the proposed approach was firstly verified simulating an evaporating spray in a constant-volume vessel at non-reacting conditions. The availability of a large quantity of experimental data allowed us to investigate in detail the effects of grid size, ambient diffusivity and used spray sub-models. In this way, different guidelines were derived for a successful simulation of the fuel–air mixture formation process. Finally, fuel injection and evaporation were simulated in an optical engine geometry and computed mixture fraction distributions were compared with experimental data.