Collisions of Liquid Droplets in a Gaseous Medium under Conditions of Intense Phase Transformations: Review

Abstract

The article presents the results of theoretical and experimental studies of coalescence, disruption, and fragmentation of liquid droplets in multiphase and multicomponent gas-vapor-droplet media. Highly promising approaches are considered to studying the interaction of liquid droplets in gaseous media with different compositions and parameters. A comparative analysis of promising technologies is carried out for the primary and secondary atomization of liquid droplets using schemes of their collision with each other. The influence of a range of factors and parameters on the collision processes of drops is analyzed, in particular, viscosity, density, surface, and interfacial tension of a liquid, trajectories of droplets in a gaseous medium, droplet velocities and sizes. The processes involved in the interaction of dissimilar droplets with a variable component composition and temperature are described. Fundamental differences are shown in the number and size of droplets formed due to binary collisions and collisions between droplets and particles at different Weber numbers. The conditions are analyzed for the several-fold increase in the number of droplets in the air flow due to their collisions in the disruption mode. A technique is described for generalizing and presenting the research findings on the interaction of drops in the form of theoretical collision regime maps using various approaches.