Method to study effect of straining flow on droplet vaporization at low Reynolds number

Current trends in gas turbine development requires cleaner and efficient combustion. In order to understand the behavior of spray combustion in detail, the numerical study on combustion can give insights about the complete process including fuel injection, droplet breakup, droplet evaporation and its combustion. We use a numerical framework developed by Palmore and Desjardins to simulate this phenomena [1]. This framework uses NGA which is a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) code for simulating low-Mach number Navier-Stokes equations. It uses interface-resolved DNS in which dynamics of flow are solved using first principles i.e. conservation of mass, momentum and energy. Matching conditions at the interface of liquid-gas phase ensures the conservation of mass, momentum and energy across the interface. As a result, the deformation of the evaporating droplet, internal flow, boundary layer growth and its separation from the droplet are captured in detail. Although the framework is capable of studying 3D flows fully, this initial study will use 2D simulations to reduce the computation expense. The results of this study will motivate further detailed investigations in 3D in future. The present work involves the method development for inflow boundary condition for single droplet evaporation problem. In addition to this, the paper studies about the effect of planar straining flow on evaporation rate of the fuel droplet. The fuel used for this study is n-Decane.