Numerical Simulation of a High Pressure Supersonic Multiphase Jet Flow Through a Gaseous Medium

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis is used to numerically study the structure and dynamics of a high-pressure, high-speed jet of a gas/liquid mixture through a gaseous medium close to the nozzle region. The complex structure of the jet near the nozzle region is captured before it breaks-up downstream. A new multiphase model based on a mixture formulation of the conservation laws for a multiphase flows is used in the simulation. The model does not require ad-hoc closure for the variation of mixture density with pressure and yields thermodynamically accurate acoustic propagation for multiphase mixtures. The numerical formulation has been implemented to a multi-physics unstructured code “RocfluMP” that solves the modified three-dimensional time-dependent Euler/Navier-Stokes equations for a multiphase framework in integral form. The Roe’s approximate Riemann solver is used to allow capturing of shock waves and contact discontinuities. For a very steep gradient, an HLLC scheme is used to resolved the isolated shock and contact waves. The developed flow solver provides a general coupled incompressible-compressible multiphase framework that can be applied to a variety of supersonic jet flow problems including fuel injection systems, thermal and plasma spray coating, and liquid-jet machining. Preliminary results for shock tube analysis and gas/liquid free surface jet flow through a gaseous medium are presented and discussed.