Fuel Effects on Nozzle Flow and Spray Using Fully Coupled Eulerian Simulations

Abstract : The objective of this study is to examine the impact of single and multi-component surrogate fuel mixtures on the atomization and mixing characteristics of non-reacting isothermal diesel engine sprays. An Eulerian modeling approach was adopted to simulate both the internal nozzle flow dynamics and the emerging turbulent spray in the near nozzle region in a fully-coupled manner. The Volume of Fluids (VoF) methodology was utilized to treat the two-phase flow dynamics including a Homogenous Relaxation approach to account for nozzle cavitation effects. To enable accurate simulations, the nozzle geometry and in-situ multi-dimensional needle lift and off-axis motion profiles have been characterized via the X-ray phase-contrast technique at Argonne National Laboratory. The flow turbulence is treated via the classical k-e Reynolds Average Navier Stoke (RANS) model with in-nozzle and near field resolution of 30 mum. Several multi-component surrogate mixtures were implemented using linear blending rules to examine the behavior of petroleum, and alternative fuels including: JP-8, JP-5, Hydro-treated Renewable Jet (HRJ), Iso-Paraffinic Kerosene (IPK) with comparison to single- component n-dodecane fuel on ECN Spray A nozzle spray dynamics. The results were validated using transient rate-of- injection measurements from the Army Research Laboratory at Spray A conditions as well as projected density fields obtained from the line-of-sight measurements from X-ray radiography measurements at The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. The conditions correspond to injection pressure, nominal fuel temperature, and ambient density of 1500 bar, 363 K, and 22.8 kg/m3, respectively. The simulation results provide a unique high-fidelity contribution to the effects of fuels on the spray mixing dynamics. The results can lead to improvements in fuel mixture distributions enhancing performance of military vehicles.