Introduction

Liquid Spray Combustion Modelling is an essential pre-requisite for determining performance of practical
spray combustion systems like Internal Combustion Engines, Gas Turbines, Boiler Furnaces, Liquid Rockets etc.
However, modeling of these systems is tedious since the liquid spray is made up of discrete hydrocarbon fuel
droplets of different diameters (in microns) which are undergoing combustion under varying conditions of pressure,
temperature etc in a turbulent ambience prevailing inside combustion chambers of various combustion systems.
These droplets experience heat transfer, break up, evaporation, collision, drag and turbulence. Therefore, several
droplet sub models representing droplet breakup, collision, evaporation, kinetics etc have to be employed
simultaneously to analyse the problem of spray burning.
Problem Statement
The present approach has been to simplify the problem of spray combustion by defining a simplified
constant volume combustion system with certain assumptions. The results obtained can provide an insight to the
complex phenomenon of spray burning. Our problem constitutes a constant volume combustion chamber which
contains compressed air at some ambient pressure and temperature. A liquid hydrocarbon fuel is injected at some
injection pressure through a injector thereby initiating combustion and a diffusion (non premixed) flame travels
inside the combustion chamber.
For our case the liquid fuel chosen is n-Heptane. The geometry of the combustion chamber is cuboidal
having dimensions 0.1mx0.01mx0.01m. The injector in our problem is single hole unit injector (hollow cone) with
diameter 140 micrometer and cone angle of 15 degree, modeled for a common rail injection system with a given fuel
mass flow rate. The computation time is set to 1 micro second and 12000 parcels are injected for each computational
cycle. We are analyzing the effect of different sub models as mentioned above, ambient temperature, ambient
pressure, cone angle on important combustion parameters like liquid spray tip penetration length (used for validation
of our results), ignition delay, rate of heat release etc.
OpenFOAM, an open source code is used for simulating spray combustion behavior. The solver used for
implementation is dieselFoam. Finite volume method is used to numerically solve the NavierStokes equations for
any 3D grid of structured polyhedral cells. We are having some problem in basic understanding of 1. Rosin
Rammler particle distribution function which may lead to the determination of initial size of the droplets (which is
not known) in a parcel. 2. We are also trying to change the fuel from n-Heptane to include practical fuels like diesel
fuel/their blends or any other fuel resembling diesel fuel. 3. We want to obtain the NOx variation under various
conditions. 4. Also geometry of the problem from cuboidal to cylindrical.