Existing droplet evaporation/combustion mod- els in computational fluid dynamics （CFD） simulation of spray combustion are based on simplified 1-D models. Both these models and recently developed 3-D models of single- droplet combustion do not give the conditions for the different existing droplet combustion modes. In this paper, droplet evaporation and combustion are studied both analytically and numerically. In the analytical solution, a 2-D axisymmetric flow surrounding an evaporating and combusting droplet was considered. The governing equations were solved using an integral method, similar to the Karman-Pohlhausen method for solving boundary-layer flows with pressure gradient. The results give a local evaporation rate and flame radius in agree- ment with experimental results. In numerical simulation, 3-D combusting gas flows surrounding an ethanol droplet were studied. The prediction results show three modes of droplet combustion under different relative velocities, explaining the change in the evaporation constant with an increase in relative velocity observed in experiments. This implies that different droplet combustion models should be developed in simu- lating spray combustion. The predicted local evaporation rate and flame radius by numerical simulation are in agree- ment with the analytical solution in the range of azimuthal angles 0° 〈 θ 〈 90°. The numerical results indicate that the drag force of an evaporating and combusting droplet is much smaller than that of a cold solid particle, and thus the currently used drag models should be modified.
Turbulence affects both combustion and NO formation. Fluctuation correlations are ideally used for quantitative analysis. From the instantaneous chemical reaction rate expression,ignoring the third-order correlation terms, the averaged reaction rate will have four terms, including the term of averaged-variable product, a concentration fluctuation correlation term, and temperature-concentration fluctuation correlation term. If the reaction-rate coefficient is denoted as K, the temperature fluctuation would be included in the K fluctuation. In order to quantitatively study the effect of turbulence on NO formation in methane-air swirling combustion, various turbulencechemistry models are tested. The magnitudes of various correlations and their effects on the time-averaged reaction rate are calculated and analyzed, and the simulation results are compared with the experimental measurement data. The results show that among various correlation moments, the correlation between the reaction-rate coefficient K fluctuation with the concentration fluctuation is most important and is a strong nonlinear term.
