Bulk Cavitation in Model Gasoline Injectors and Their Correlation with the Instantaneous Liquid Flow Field

Abstract

It is well established that spray characteristics from automotive injectors depend on, among other factors, whether cavitation arises in the injector nozzle. Bulk cavitation, which refers to the cavitation development distant from walls and thus far from the streamline curvature associated with salient points on a wall, has not been thoroughly investigated experimentally in injector nozzles. Consequently, it is not clear what is causing this phenomenon. The research objective of this study was to visualize cavitation in three different injector models (designated as Type A, Type B, and Type C) and quantify the liquid flow field in relation to the bulk cavitation phenomenon. In all models, bulk cavitation was present. We expected this bulk cavitation to be associated with a swirling flow with its axis parallel to that of the nozzle. However, liquid velocity measurements obtained through particle image velocimetry (PIV) demonstrated the absence of a swirling flow structure in the mean flow field just upstream of the nozzle exit, at a plane normal to the hypothetical axis of the injector. Consequently, we applied proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to analyze the instantaneous liquid velocity data records in order to capture the dominant coherent structures potentially related to cavitation. It was found that the most energetic mode of the liquid flow field corresponded to the expected instantaneous swirling flow structure when bulk cavitation was present in the flow.