New EPSRC Grant
Application of a kinetic numerical algorithm to modelling diesel fuel droplets evaporation
The work is being undertaken in conjunction with Professor Morgan Heikal and Visiting Researcher Dr Irina Shishkova from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute.
Although the droplet evaporation process is essentially a kinetic one (its description requires the analysis of the distribution function of molecules), in practical engineering applications its analysis is almost universally based on the hydrodynamic approximation. In the recent paper published by the Sergei Sazhin (pictured right), together with researchers from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, it was pointed out that the latter approximation may lead to noticeable underestimates of the evaporation time of droplets in diesel engines, where the applicability of this approximation has never been questioned to the best of our knowledge. The kinetic model used in this paper for the comparison with the hydrodynamic one, however, was a rather simplistic one. The preliminary results reported in the paper were therefore not conclusive.
Since the publication of this paper a new numerical state-of-the-art kinetic algorithm has been developed, which made it possible to take into account a number of processes which were overlooked by a simplistic model used earlier. The main focus of this work will be on the application of this new algorithm to the modelling of the evaporation processes in diesel engines. This is expected to establish for the first time the quantitative errors introduced by the hydrodynamic model for this particular process, and open the way to develop a new kinetic model for this engineering application.
