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Published October 2003 | Published
Journal Article Open

Statistical Model of Multicomponent-Fuel Drop Evaporation for Many-Drop Flow Simulations

Abstract

A statistical formulation is developed describing the composition in an evaporating multicomponent-fuel liquid drop and in the gas phase surrounding it. When a complementary discrete-component model is used, it is shown that, when drops are immersed in a carrier gas containing fuel vapor, condensation of species onto the drop results in the development of a minor peak in the liquid composition probability distribution function (PDF). This peak leads to a PDF shape that can be viewed as a combination of two gamma PDFs, which is determined by five parameters. A model is developed for calculating the parameters of the two combined gamma PDFs. Extensive tests of the model for both diesel and gasoline show that the PDF results replicate accurately the discrete model predictions. Most important, the mean and variance of the composition at the drop surface are in excellent agreement with the discrete model. Results from the model show that although the second peak is minor for the liquid PDF, its corresponding peak for the vapor distribution at the drop surface has a comparable magnitude to and sometimes exceeds that corresponding to the first peak. Four-parameter models are also exercised, and it is shown that they are unable to capture the physics of the problem.

Additional Information

© 2003 by the California Institute of Technology. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission. Received 14 January 2003; revision received 10 June 2003; accepted for publication 12 June 2003. This research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, under the partial sponsorship of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), with Neil Rossmeissl and Roxanne Danz (DOE Headquarters) and D. Hooker (DOE Golden Center) serving as Contract Monitors, under an agreement with NASA. Additional sponsorship was provided by the Donors of The Petroleum Research Fund administered by the American Chemical Society through a grant to J. Bellan that supported a California Institute of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow (P. C. Le Clercq).

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Created:
September 15, 2023
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October 23, 2023