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Understanding the development and breakup of interfacial waves in a two-phase mixing layer between the gas and liquid streams is paramount to atomization. Due to the velocity difference between the two streams, the shear on the interface triggers a longitudinal instability, which develops to interfacial waves that propagate downstream. As the interfacial waves grow spatially, transverse modulations arise, turning the interfacial waves from quasi-two-dimensional to fully three-dimensional. The inlet gas turbulence intensity has a strong impact on the interfacial instability. Therefore, parametric direct numerical simulations are performed in the present study to systematically investigate the effect of the inlet gas turbulence on the formation, development and breakup of the interfacial waves. The open-source multiphase flow solver, PARIS, is used for the simulations and the mass–momentum consistent volume-of-fluid method is used to capture the sharp gas–liquid interfaces. Two computational domain widths are considered and the wide domain will allow a detailed study of the transverse development of the interfacial waves. The dominant frequency and spatial growth rate of the longitudinal instability are found to increase with the inlet gas turbulence intensity. The dominant transverse wavenumber, determined by the Rayleigh–Taylor instability, scales with the longitudinal frequency, so it also increases with the inlet gas turbulence intensity. The holes formed in the liquid sheet are important to the disintegration of the interfacial waves. The hole formation is influenced by the inlet gas turbulence. As a result, the sheet breakup dynamics and the statistics of the droplets formed also change accordingly.
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Effect of gas viscosity on the interfacial instability development in a two-phase mixing layer
The interfacial instability in a two-phase mixing layers between parallel gas and liquid streams is important to two-phase atomization. Depending on the inflow conditions and fluid properties, interfacial instability can be convective or absolute. The goal of the present study is to investigate the impact of gas viscosity on the interfacial instability. Both interface-resolved simulations and linear stability analysis (LSA) have been conducted. In LSA, the Orr–Sommerfeld equation is solved to analyze the spatio-temporal viscous modes. When the gas viscosity decreases, the Reynold number (Re) increases accordingly. The LSA demonstrates that when Re is higher than a critical threshold, the instability transitions from the absolute to the convective (A/C) regimes. Such a Re-induced A/C transition is also observed in the numerical simulations, though the critical Re observed in simulations is significantly lower than that predicted by LSA. The LSA results indicate that the temporal growth rate decreases with Re. When the growth rate reaches zero, the A/C transition will occur. The Re-induced A/C transition is observed in both confined and unconfined mixing layers and also in cases with low and high gas-to-liquid density ratios. In the transition from typical absolute and convective regimes, a weak absolute regime is identified in the simulations, for which the spectrograms show both the absolute and convective modes. The dominant frequency in the weak absolute regime can be influenced by the perturbation introduced at the inlet. The simulation results also show that the wave propagation speed can vary in space. In the absolute instability regime, the wave propagation speed agrees well with the absolute mode celerity near the inlet and increases to the Dimotakis speed further downstream.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2321396
- PAR ID:
- 10595675
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Journal of Multiphase Flow
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Multiphase Flow
- Volume:
- 181
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0301-9322
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 105026
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Two-phase mixing layer Interfacial instability Viscous effect
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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