INVESTIGATION ON SPRAY CHARACTERISTICS UNDER ULTRA-HIGH INJECTION PRESSURE CONDITIONS

This article reports the experimental and numerical results for free sprays under ultra-high injection pressure conditions to give us better understandings of spray characteristics and also to make clear a limit pressure condition in diesel sprays. The high pressure injection system developed in this work is devised to reach ultra-high pressure conditions in the range from 150 MPa to 355 MPa. The free spray injected from a single nozzle injector is visualized by the Schlieren technique and the high speed camera. In particular, it is found that the shock waves are present and propagated along the edge of spray in the downstream direction. The measured spray penetration length increases gradually with the injection pressure, but its increasing rate is decreased as the injection pressure increases. The Sauter mean diameter is also no longer augmented for the injection pressures higher than 300 MPa. In addition, the three­dimensional numerical simulations are conducted for comparing the measurements with the predictions based on two different breakup models. The TAB model results show better agreements with experimental data than the WAVE model under ultra-high injection pressure conductions. Moreover, the simulation results show that the gas-phase pressure increases substantially in the vicinity of the spray tip region. It supports the experimental observation that the shock waves are formed at the front of spray tip and are propagated downstream.