Fuel Droplet Evaporation in a Supercritical Environment

This paper reports a numerical investigation of the transcritical and supercritical droplet vaporization phenomena. The simulation is based on the time-dependent conservation equations for liquid and gas phases, pressure-dependent variable thermophysical properties, and a detailed treatment of liquid-vapor phase equilibrium at the droplet surface. The numerical solution of the two-phase equations employs an arbitrary Eulerian-Lagrangian, explicit-implicit method with a dynamically adaptive mesh. Three different equations of state (EOS), namely the Redlich-Kwong (RK), the Peng-Robinson (PR) and Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK) EOS, are employed to represent phase equilibrium at the droplet surface. In addition, two different methods are used to determine the liquid density. Results indicate that the predictions of RK-EOS are significantly different from those obtained by using the RK-EOS and SRK-EOS. For the phase-equilibrium of n-heptane-nitrogen system, the RK-EOS predicts higher liquid-phase solubility of nitrogen, higher fuel vapor concentration, lower critical-mixing-state temperature, and lower enthalpy of vaporization. As a consequence, it significantly overpredicts droplet vaporization rates, and underpredicts droplet lifetimes compared to those predicted by PR- and SRK-EOS. In contrast, predictions using the PR-EOS and SRK-EOS show excellent agreement with each other and with experimental data over a wide range of conditions. A detailed investigation of the transcritical droplet vaporization phenomena indicates that at low to moderate ambient temperatures, the droplet lifetime first increases and then decreases as the ambient pressure is increased. At high ambient temperatures, however, the droplet lifetime decreases monotonically with pressure. This behavior is in accord with the reported experimental data.