A combined Eulerian and Lagrangian method for prediction of evaporating sprays

Abstract

Polydisperse sprays in complex three-dimensional flow systems are important in many technical applications. Numerical descriptions of sprays are used to achieve a fast and accurate prediction of complex two-phase flows. The Eulerian and Lagrangian methods are two essentially different approaches for the modeling of disperse two-phase flows. Both methods have been implemented into the same computational fluid dynamics package which is based on a three-dimensional body-fitted finite volume method. Considering sprays represented by a small number of droplet starting conditions, the Eulerian method is clearly superior in terms of computational efficiency. However, with respect to complex polydisperse sprays, the Lagrangian technique gives a higher accuracy. In addition, Lagrangian modeling of secondary effects such as spray-wall interaction enhances the physical description of the two-phase flow. Therefore, in the present approach the Eulerian and the Lagrangian methods have been combined in a hybrid method. The Eulerian method is used to determine a preliminary solution of the two-phase flow field. Subsequently, the Lagrangian method is employed to improve the accuracy of the first solution using detailed sets of initial conditions. Consequently, this combined approach improves the overall convergence behavior of the simulation. In the final section, the advantages of each method are discussed when predicting an evaporating spray in an intake manifold of an internal combustion engine.