Impingement of an unsteady two-phase jet on unheated and heated flat plates

Abstract

This paper is concerned with an experimental investigation of the oblique impingement of an unsteady, axisymmetric two-phase jet on heated surfaces. Size and velocity were measured simultaneously with a phase-Doppler velocimeter, and the spatial distributions over the wall jet were found to be correlated with the interfacial activities as inferred from vertical velocity measurements in the vicinity of the wall. These results are discussed together with size measurements by a laser-diffraction technique to quantify the effect of the approach conditions of the inflowing jet droplet field and wall temperature in relation to mechanisms of secondary atomization.Two mechanisms of secondary atomization were identified; the first did not involve direct wall contact and was due to the strain acting on the droplets by the continuous phase within the impingement region and was enhanced by thermal effects from the wall to cause breakup. The approaching velocity of the inflowing droplets to the plate was important to this process so that higher velocities increased the rate of strain within the impingement region and, consequently, the wall temperature promoting the secondary atomization shifted towards lower values. The second mechanism required direct wall contact and involved atomization of the film deposited on the wall by the impingement of the inflowing two-phase jet. With the penetration of high-speed inflowing droplets into the film, liquid mass was raised into the two-phase medium due to splashes from the film so that a new size class with larger droplets was generated. The resulting large droplets tended to stay close to the wall within the impingement region with small vertical velocitiesIn between the injections, the suspended droplet field above the film oscillated normal to the plate as a cloud so that the impact of large droplets on the film resulted in coalescence with the film and the ejection of smaller numbers of small droplets. The unsteady wall jet flow, caused by the arrival of the spray at the plate, swept the vertically oscillating droplet cloud radially outwards so that the resulting radial transport caused the dynamics of the unsteady film to be correlated with the size characteristics of the unsteady wall jet. Based on this phenomenological description, a radial droplet transport equation is derived.The correlation suggests that the secondary atomization with direct wall contact is the dominant process for the generation of a new size class within the wall flow and initiates the mutual interaction between the unsteady film and wall jet droplet field.