Towards an Efficient, High-Fidelity Methodology for Liquid Jet Atomization Computations

The aim of this work is to show how adaptive mesh refinement and Lagrangian tracking can be integrated to enable high-fidelity computations of jet atomization and dispersion for industrially relevant configurations. In its present form, the Coupled Level Set and Volume of Fluid (CLSVOF) method for multiphase flow calculations is embedded in a dynamic, block-structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data structure which maximizes grid density at the liquid-gas interface. With the treatment proposed here, small liquid structures formed by atomization can be removed from the Eulerian description, transformed into Lagrangian particles, and advected using, for instance, a simple spherical model. As a result, mesh refinement is not required in the dilute spray region and can be contained to a smaller portion of the computational domain with minimal loss of accuracy. Two validation studies of liquid jet atomization by crossflowing gas and by jet-on-jet impingement are presented to demonstrate this new approach.