Cavitation in fuel injector nozzles for diesel engines interacts with turbulence and affects the characteristics of the liquid jet in the combustion chamber. Numerical investigations of the effects of cavitation on the liquid jet require a model that takes into account both cavitation and free gas phenomena.
In this work a homogenous equilibrium cavitation model is extended adding a non- condensable gas component. The homogeneous water-vapor-gas mixture is described by a coupled mixture Equation of State (EOS).
Numerical simulations of cavitating flows with gas require a robust scheme for the mass transport to handle the large density gradients. Another important parameter for the stability and accuracy of the model besides mass transport is the transport of the gas mass fraction, which is modeled as a scalar. In this work various schemes for mass and scalar transport are tested with a focus on preserving scalar boundedness and stability limitations in cavitating flow simulations.
To validate the model four different cavitation regimes presented by Sou et al. (Effects of cavitation in a nozzle on liquid jet atomization, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, 2007) of water discharged from a rectangular large-scale nozzle into ambient air, are numerically investigated using a three-dimensional compressible Large-Eddy-Simulation (LES). The homogenous mixture model reproduces the liquid jet in good agreement with the experiment. Cavitation is also well predicted by the compressible, implicit LES with the chosen cavitation model.
Keywords: Cavitation, Large-Eddy-Simulation, jet characteristics, liquid-gas-interphase, nozzle flow.
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