International Conference on Advances in Materials and Mechanical Engineering (ICAMME-2015)

SIMULATION OF DIESEL SPRAY IN A

CONSTANT VOLUME COMBUSTION
CHAMBER USING OPEN SOURCE CFD
(OPEN FOAM)
K. Senthilnathan1 R.Sivakumar2,C. Mariyappan3
1Mechanical, Egs pillai Engg.College, India
E-mail: senthilnathan1979@gmail,com
2Mechanical, Karaikal polytechnic, India
E-mail: divyamariyappan@gmail,com
3Mechanical, Karaikal polytechnic, India
E-mail: yazgansiv2013@gmail,com

Abstract: Modeling is a very important tool connect the theoretical

approach to real time situation CFD(Computational Fluid
Dynamics) techniques are more popular now a days to analyze the
various fluid flow problems, using the latest developments on the
various numerical equation solving methods like Eulerien grid,
lagrangian Parcels etc.,In this paper , deals with various diesel
spray modeling concepts and the spray model was developed
using C++ for various process parameters like, Diesel fuel
chemistry spray angle , nozzle geometry, modeling chemistry.
Finally the diesel spray code was run using Open Foam and the
results were discussed and shown.

a deeper understanding of these complex flows. In the next

stage, the spray model was integrated into the in-cylinder flow
to observe the outcome of the interaction between the spray and
the flow. The motivations of this project is to understand the
functionality and utility of the CFD code OpenFoam in spray
simulations .
II . SPRAY MODELING CONCEPTS
The different types of modeling are shown below and
the system running time required for simulations .

Keywords: IC Engines, CFD, Diesel spray , OpenFoam

I . INTRODUCTION
The Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has developed
to the point where the complete three dimensional flow field
over the vehicle and through engines can be computed
expeditiously with accuracy and reliability. To achieve this
requirement, the industry must investigate a range of factors
that can potentially reduce engine emissions, including fuels,
combustion process, chemical-kinetics, in-cylinder flow, fuelair mixture formation, sprays, engine geometries, etc.
Nowadays, computational simulations have been adopted as a
key analysis tool in engine research to establish correlation with
experimental studies and provide new information for
designers. A significant advantage of using Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is the flexibility of simulation setups
and the time and cost efficiencies compared to experiments.
Major CFD commercial codes that are available in the market
currently include ANSYS CFX, ANSYS FLUENT,AVL FIRE
and CD-adapco STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+, whereas KIVA
and OpenFOAM are becoming popular as open source codes.
OpenFOAM has been chosen in this study to take advantage of
its ability to simulate general flow problems. It offers different
kinds of models to evaluate engine characteristics.
At the first stages of this work, different sub models of
the engine, especially turbulence and spray models, were
configured and the flow field was simulated in an effort to gain

Fig. 1 Different types of models

While the thermodynamic combustion models are

relatively easy to handle and are characterized by a low
computational effort, they are lacking the ability to make
predictions of the effects of important engine parameters on
combustion without prior measurements. The main reasons for
this deficiency are that major sub processes are either not
modeled at all or described by solely empirical correlations and
that the assumption of an ideally mixed combustion chamber
makes it impossible to estimate pollutant formation rates that
are strongly affected by local temperatures and mixture

E.G.S Pillay Engineering College, Nagapattinam

K. Senthilnathan1 R.Sivakumar2, C. Mariyappan3

compositions. On the other hand, the multidimensional CFD

models that are based on the locally resolved solutions of mass,
energy, and momentum, conservation and that include detailed
sub models for spray and combustion phenomena, are
computationally expensive, and they demand that the user has a
much deeper understanding of the governing physical and
chemical processes in order to correctly interpret the simulation
results. Moreover, the predictive quality with respect to global
quantities such as pressure traces and apparent heat release
rates is not necessarily better than with simpler models.

Fig. 2 . Computation time for Different models

A . The Spray Equation

In typical diesel sprays the liquid fuel is atomized into
a number of up to 108 droplets with average diameters in the
ten-micrometer range. These numbers make it prohibitive to
resolve each single droplet in numerical simulations. Instead,
some kind of statistical averaging technique becomes necessary
with additional sub models in order to describe the subscale
processes.

B . Spray breakup regimes

Fig. 3 Various Breakup Models

C. Atomization model
A hybrid model for the atomization of the liquid fuel
jet was developed and tested in previous work . It distinguishes
between jet primary breakup and droplet secondary breakup.

For the latter different models are used as the droplet Weber
number changes. For the low pressure case the Wave breakup
model was adopted to simulate liquid core atomization. For
high-pressure sprays the effects of jet turbulence and cavitation
on liquid core primary breakup are considered. In order to
distinguish between primary and secondary breakup the
following assumptions have been made:
primary blobs may undergo primary breakup;
the secondary droplets formed may undergo
secondary breakup;
the primary blobs that have lost the 80% of the initial
mass may undergo secondary breakup.
The flow model was used to evaluate the occurrence
of cavitations and the level of turbulence in the injector. Initial
blob size, velocity and related k and E are estimated. Then
Gosman's approach is followed, but if cavitation does occur it is
taken into account since it affects turbulence and related values
of k and E in the injector. The model also takes into account
exponential growth by K-H instabilities due to interaction with
air, so the three main mechanisms are considered.
1) The WAVE model is based on a stability analysis of
liquid jets. It can be used to simulate the primary
atomization of the liquid core in the regimes in which
jet breakup is governed by aerodynamic interaction
with air (low-medium injection pressure case).
2) The TAB and DDB models are based on the dynamic
of a single droplet and they can be therefore
considered as secondary breakup models. Since in the
first the breakup is due to the amplification of droplet
deformation resulting from vibrational resonance of
the surface, this model has been chosen to predict the
droplet breakup in the Vibrational regime. The latter is
a deformation-induced secondary breakup model and
it is used in the Bag regime.
3) The R-T model considers Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities
that arise on very high-speed droplet surfaces and
therefore it can be adopted to model droplet secondary
breakup in the catastrophic regime in competition with
a K-H instability based model (WAVE). The WAVE
model is based on the physics of a liquid column
(primary breakup) but, since it considers K-H
instability effects, it can be also used to simulate the
breakup of secondary droplets in those regimes in
which it may be ascribed to the shear forces at the
interface.
A variety of mathematical models for drop breakup have
been proposed in the literature. Most of these models have been
established in order to describe one particular of the above
breakup mechanisms. Nevertheless, in engine spray simulations
they are - for the sake of simplicity - often applied to the entire
spectrum of breakup regimes. This is not entirely true though.
In recent years it has become more and more standard to
determine the governing breakup mechanism for a droplet class
and then apply the more appropriate of at least two breakup
models, e.g. a combination of the Kelvin-Helrnholtz and the
Rayleigh-Taylor model. In the subsequent sections the
secondary breakup models that are applied most often in engine
spray simulations will be discussed

International Conference on Advances in Materials and Mechanical Engineering (ICAMME-2015)

III. VARIOUS MODELS APPLIED IN OPEN FOAM

IV. MODELING OF DIESEL SPRAY USING OPENFOAM
A.The Reitz-Diwakar Model
The overall structure of OpenFOAM is shown in Figure
In a first attempt to include secondary drop let breakup in
CFD spray calculations Reitz and Diwakar Whenever one of
the breakup criteria is satisfied for a drop let dass for longer
than the respective breakup time, it is assumed that the original
droplet is disintegrated into a number of smaller drop lets. All
child droplets are of equal size. It is determined from equating
the respective breakup criterion to its critical value and by
solving it for the droplet diameter. Thus, it is assumed that the
new child droplets are initially in a state that is just stable. The
below equation depicts the relationship of the child and parent
droplets formed.

A.Pre-processing

B.The Rayleigh-Taylor Breakup Model

The following steps describes how to pre-process,

run and post-process a case involving compressible re-acting
flow with Lagrangian evaporating particles in a threedimensional domain. It also describes how to copy the solver,
copy an evaporation model and how to add a second material to
the discrete particles

Fig.4. Structure of openfoam

The Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) breakup model is based on

theoretical considerations of Taylor , who investigated the
stability of liquid-gas interfaces when accelerated in a normal
direction to the plane. Generally, it can be observed that the
interface is stable when acceleration and density gradient point
to the same direction, whereas Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities can
develop if the fluid acceleration

has an opposite direction to the density gradient. For a liquid

droplet decelerated by drag forces in a gas phase this means,
that instabilities may grow unstable at the trailing edge of the
droplet.
Fig.5 A Portion of Combustion Chamber

C. CFD Formulations
The below steps to be followed for implementing any
kind of CFD simulations .Frame the governing equation and
reduce to RANS equations , apply the assumptions for
turbulence and kinetic energy, finally frame the model .
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)

Governing Equations
Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) Equations
Standard k- model
Renormalization Group (RNG) k- model
Standard k- model

The geometry consists of a block filled with air, with a

0.01x0.01 meter base and a length of 0.1 meter. An injector is
centrally placed on the top boundary where n-Heptane (C7 H16 )
is injected. When the discrete droplets enter the domain they
evaporate and combustion takes place in the gas phase. There
are several gas phase reaction schemes supplied with the case
ranging from a reaction scheme with 5 species and one reaction
up to a reaction scheme involving 300 reactions and 56
species. This section covers the necessary setup needed to get
the diesel Foam case running with chemistry ,it also covers a
brief introduction to reacting flows in numerical simulations.
B.Running the code

E.G.S Pillay Engineering College, Nagapattinam

K. Senthilnathan1 R.Sivakumar2, C. Mariyappan3

First establish the required model, For evaporation ,

spray breakup, collision etc If required change the initial
conditions like temperature and pressure etc. Change the
boundary conditions

After running the various models , The results are listed by the
following figures.

Remove ft and fu and in the aachenBomb/0 directory

since these are not needed for this setup (keeping them will
result in post-processing problems).
cd $FOAM_RUN/aachenBomb/0
rm ft fu
Turn chemistry on in the
/constant/chemistryProperties file moodels

Fig . 6 CASE1: Ignition off, Chemistry on, Temperature 800K,Spray cone

angle 60o , ReitzKHRT model.

chemistry on;
and
ignition
on
in
the
/constant/combustionProperties file. This step is not
necessary, the mixture will still ignite when the species are
properly mixed due to the high temperature.
ignite on;
Mesh the geometry using blockMesh, and start the
dieselFoam solver.
cd $FOAM_RUN/aachenBomb
blockMesh
dieselFoam

Fig . 7 CASE2: Ignition off, Chemistry off Temperature 300K,Spray cone

angle 40o , ETAB model

C.Post-processing in ParaView
Since paraFoam can not handle Lagrangian particles
use foamToVTK and then ParaView.
cd $FOAM_RUN/aachenBomb
foamToVTK
paraview
In the /VTK directory open the case
( aachenBomb\1.vtk ) and also, open the particles in the

file

Fig. 8 CASE3: Ignition off, Chemistry off, Temperature 300K,Spray cone

angle 20o , Rietzdiwakar model

/Lagrangian/defaultCloud_2.vtk file.
D .Spray breakup models
Also in this project work the following cases are
implemented the various spray characteristics as follows,
1) ETAB model
2) RietzKHRT Model
3) RietzDIWAKAR model
4) TAB model
5) Initial Tempreture
6) Initial Pressure
7) Spray cone angle ( 20o, 40o , 60o)

Fig . 9 CASE4: Ignition off, Chemistry off, Temperature 300K,Spray cone

angle 20o , TAB model

International Conference on Advances in Materials and Mechanical Engineering (ICAMME-2015)

V. CONCLUSION
In this Paper ,presents the various applications of spray
modeling in a constant volume combustion chamber using
OPENFOAM .Improved sub models for turbulence and
chemistry interactions using a detailed chemistry approach
is presented. The latest developments on the various
numerical equation solving methods like Eulerien grid
(for gas Phase),lagrangian Parcels(liquid phase) are
used for multiphase flow modeling.
Also varying the following process parameters,
Temperature, Pressure, and Spray breakup models (TAB,
ETAB, REITZKHRT, REITZDIWAKAR), switching
off the chemistry, switching off ignition, and Varying
spray cone angles ( 20o , 40o, 60o) diesel foam solver was
run and the results are analyzed
REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]
[5]

O'rourke, P.J., and Amsden, A.A. The Tab Method for Numerical
Calculation ofSpray Droplet Breakup. SAE Technical Paper
872089, 1987.
Reitz, R.D. Modeling Atomization Processes in High-Pressure
Vaporizing Sprays.Atomisation and Spray Technology, 3, pp. 309337, 1987.
Model with the Eulerian-Lagrangian Spray Atomization (ELSA)
Model in DieselEngine Conditions. SAE Technical Paper 2005-010213, 2005.
www.caelinux.org
www.openfoam.org

E.G.S Pillay Engineering College, Nagapattinam