3D-coupling of Volume-of-Fluid and Lagrangian particle tracking for spray atomization simulation in OpenFOAM

Simulations of spray breakup are challenging due to a wide range of different length and time scales. While Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) is suited for the primary breakup, the secondary breakup and the dilute spray cloud is better resolved using a Lagrangian particle tracking (LPT) method. This publication proposes a 3D coupling between both models using the CFD software OpenFOAM to resolve the complete process of spray atomization. Combined with adaptive mesh refinement, the computational cost can be reduced significantly. The simulation of a fuel jet in crossflow demonstrates the accuracy and speedup of the proposed method.