The efficient and clean combustion of liquid fuels is a fundamental requirement in the design of future energy systems. Simulation plays a more and more important role in the design of such burners. In this work the spray combustion simulation approach introduced by Ma (2016) is improved, and validated against the CORIA Jet Spray Flame database (Verdier et al., 2017). The database presents droplet temperatures measured by global rainbow refractometry technique, which gives a unique insight in the flame structure. The two phase flow is treated with an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach. Flamelet Generated Manifold (FGM) is used to model the gas phase combustion. The RANS equations are solved using final volume method, with standard k − ε turbulence modelling. The turbulence-chemistry interaction is addressed with assumed probability density function method. The spray cloud is modelled with the Lagrangian transport of droplets including heat and mass transfer. Ma (2016) developed a solver based on the OpenFOAM 2.3.x libraries. His development is complemented in this work with a novel spray model. The improved spray modelling allows the treatment of droplet evaporation in the context of FGM without limiting the complexity of the chemical mechanism. This improvement is crucial for the modelling of complex fuels and the correct prediction of emissions. The modelling concept is rather light-weight considering the RANS approach. Despite the low computational expenses, most of the results agree fairly well with the measurement data. However the correct prediction of droplet temperature remains an an unresolved problem.

Ma, L. (2016). Computational modelling of turbulent spray combustion. PhD Thesis, Delft University of Technology.

Verdier, A., Santiago, J. M., Vandel, A., Saengkaew, S., Cabot, G., Grehan, G., and Renou, B. (2017). Experimental study of local flame structures and fuel droplet properties of a spray jet flame. Proceedings of the Combustion Institute , 36(2):2595-2602.