Assessment of gas and liquid velocities induced by an impacting liquid drop

B. H. Bang, S. S. Yoon, H. Y. Kim, S. D. Heister, H. Park, S. C. James

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    14 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    A two-phase flow model using the boundary element method was applied to investigate the physics of a liquid drop impacting onto a solid, dry plate. Xu et al. showed that air pressure plays an important role in splashing: as air pressure was reduced, splashing of an ethanol drop with a Weber number of 838 was suppressed. This remarkable observation provided the motivation for the current modeling effort. We numerically investigate how air pressure affects the behavior of an impacting drop. Surveying both inside and outside the impacting drop, velocities of both the liquid and gas are computed. Simulations show that gas speed, as it is displaced by the falling drop, is more than three times higher than the incoming drop speed. Air entrainment induced by the displaced gas seems to be an important contributor to corona formation, which always precedes any instability, fingering, or splashing of the liquid. To describe drop-impact phenomena, the maximum spreading diameter of the drop and the topology of the impacting fluid are reported as functions of Weber number and gas density.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)55-66
    Number of pages12
    JournalInternational Journal of Multiphase Flow
    Volume37
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2011 Jan

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    This research was supported by Research Center of Break-through Technology Program through the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (2009-3021010030-11-1). This study was partly supported by a grant from the cooperative R&D Program (B551179-08-03-00) funded by the Korea Research Council Industrial Science and Technology, Republic of Korea. The last author acknowledges that Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.

    Keywords

    • Aerodynamics effect
    • Air entrapment
    • BEM
    • Drop impact
    • Kelvin-Helmholtz instability
    • Splashing
    • Two-phase flow

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Mechanical Engineering
    • General Physics and Astronomy
    • Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

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