https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01811-9
Regular Article
Effect of liquid to gas density ratio on primary breakup of a spray from a pressure swirl atomizer
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, 502284, Kandi, Sangareddy, Telangana, India
Received:
25
April
2025
Accepted:
16
July
2025
Published online:
4
August
2025
This paper reports the effect of liquid-to-gas density ratio on liquid sheet breakup of a spray emanating from a pressure swirl atomizer. Using linear stability analysis, a dispersion was derived to analyze temporal instability of viscous annular sheet under various liquid–gas density ratio. This analysis shows that the growth rate generally increases with the decrease in the density ratio. The supporting experiments and numerical simulations were also performed to determine sheet breakup lengths and spray cone angles for various density ratios. High speed videography of sprays in a constant volume spray chamber were performed for density ratios varying from and numerical simulations using an in-house solver based on OpenFOAM libraries that uses coupled level-set VOF method for density ratios ranging from 102 to 10. Based on the sheet breakup length estimated from these experiments and numerical simulations, a sheet breakup model has been proposed using the time scale and critical growth rate estimated from the dispersion equation. The final droplet size after primary breakup shows a strong dependency on density ratio and it increases by a factor of 3 when the density ratio decreases from 103 to 10.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01811-9.
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Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
