Modeling Gasoline Spray-Wall Interactions and Comparison to Experimental Data

The effects of a gasoline spray impinging on a heated surface were investigated under simulated engine conditions in an earlier study. The data from the experimental investigation have now been compared to results obtained from Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations generated using several different numerical models for spray-wall impingement found in the literature.

It was found that the models based on single-drop experiments do not predict the outcome of spray impingement well in some respects. Their major drawback was that the predicted diameter distributions of the reflected drops in the secondary spray were shifted downwards from the measured drop size distributions. The tested models predicted the normal velocity component relative to the wall well. However, they were less good at capturing the tangential velocity component relative to the wall. Since the models did not capture the velocities in the tangential direction correctly, the spread of the secondary spray above the wall was under-predicted.