Applied Math Seminar Announcement

Lagrangian particle tracking is widely used to model two-phase flows such as high-velocity dense sprays. The effects due to sprays and chemical reactions on the continuous gas phase are modeled via the addition of appropriate source terms to the gas phase equations. Problems in this approach occur due to the dependence of the liquid-gas coupling on the spatial resolution of the gas phase. The objective of this research project is to develop a general method which reduces or eliminates these mesh dependencies by improving upon methods used for the liquid-gas coupling, particularly mass and momentum exchange.

An overview of studies reported in the literature for improving liquid-gas coupling for sprays will be presented. Subsequently, a general method for reducing the dependency of this coupling on the spatial resolution of the gas phase will be discussed using the engine simulation research code KIVA3 as a modeling platform. As opposed to the original method in KIVA3, which calculates the gas velocity at a particle location as the velocity of the nearest computational node, a scheme for interpolating this value will be proposed. In addition, a method is proposed for distributing the momentum source term to the gas phase. This method will consist of a weighted averaging scheme to distribute momentum to all the nodes of the computational cell which contains the droplet in question.

* This talk is a research proposal presentation for the CS&E program.