Direct Numerical Simulation of Atomization Characteristics of ECN Spray-G Injector: In-Nozzle Fluid Flow and Breakup Processes

In order to sustain applications dealing with various liquid fuels in internal combustion engine (ICE), it is essential to make available prediction methodologies that allow an early evaluation of the potential usefulness of such fuels in terms of favourable mixture preparation process already in realistic configurations. Since the air-mixture formation and subsequent processes are predominantly governed by the fuel injection, a DNS based numerical investigation coupled with VOF as an interface tracking method is carried out in this paper to gain better insight on the fuel injection from an industrial injector "Spray G" configuration. Chosen from Engine Combustion Network (ECN), this is a gasoline direct injector (GDI) featuring 8-holes orifices and operating with high injection pressure (200 bar). Under consideration of the required computational cost associated with DNS, only the 1/8 of the nozzle geometry including one orifice is used. The numerical simulation is accomplished for the quasi-steady injection condition with nozzle needle fully opened. The obtained results are first validated with available experimental data for nozzle mass flow rate and spray spread angle showing a good agreement. Then, a detailed numerical analysis is provided for the in/near nozzle flow evolution especially for flow turbulence, primary and secondary atomization. Furthermore, droplet statistics in terms of droplet shape, and droplet size-velocity distribution together with a breakup regime map are reported. Finally, a 2-D data curation technique is proposed to extract the droplet statistics along selected planes and evaluated by direct comparison with three-dimensional droplet data, which may allow handling of the DNS data in more feasible and economical way especially for time series data with higher frequency. The comprehensive DNS data generated by this DNS-VOF approach enable not only to carry out detailed numerical analysis of in- and near-nozzle physical phenomena for which experimental data are still scarce, but also to provide a hint of more reliable injector boundary conditions useful for lower order spray injection method based on Lagrangian particle tracking.