Eulerian-Lagrangian modelling of detonative combustion in two-phase gas-droplet mixtures with OpenFOAM: Validations and verifications

A hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian solver RYrhoCentralFoam is developed based on OpenFOAM (R) to simulate detonative combustion in two-phase gas-liquid mixtures. For Eulerian gas phase, RYrhoCentralFoam enjoys second order of accuracy in time and space discretizations and is based on finite volume method on polyhedral cells. The following developments are made based on the standard compressible flow solver rhoCentralFoam in OpenFOAM (R): (1) multi-component species transport, (2) detailed fuel chemistry for gas phase combustion, and (3) Lagrangian solver for gas-droplet two-phase flows and sub-models for liquid droplets. To extensively verify and validate the developments and implementations of the solver and models, a series of benchmark cases are studied, including non-reacting multi-component gaseous flows, purely gaseous detonations, and two-phase gas-droplet mixtures. The results show that the RYrhoCentralFoam solver can accurately predict the flow discontinuities (e.g. shock wave and expansion wave), molecular diffusion, auto-ignition and shock-induced ignition. Also, the RYrhoCentralFoam solver can accurately simulate gaseous detonation propagation for different fuels (e.g. hydrogen and methane), about propagation speed, detonation frontal structures and cell size. Sub models related to the droplet phase are verified and/or validated against analytical and experimental data. It is also found that the RYrhoCentralFoam solver is able to capture the main quantities and features of the gas droplet two-phase detonations, including detonation propagation speed, interphase interactions and detonation frontal structures. As our future work, RYrhoCentralFoam solver can also be extended for simulating twophase detonations in dense droplet sprays.

Automated summary

RYrhoCentralFoam is a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian solver developed based on OpenFOAM (R) for simulating detonative combustion in two-phase gas-liquid mixtures with high accuracy and diverse functionalities.