Droplet Combustion Modeling

Reactive droplet collision (Click to enlarge)

This work is focused on development of a comprehensive droplet-scale combustion and CFD simulation for hypergols at high Weber numbers and with non-Newtonian viscoelastic propellants.

By building off the rheological measurements and simulations and the gas-phase kinetics studies from our collaborators on the MURI team we are developing a tool to look at the effect of initial mixing on the ignition behavior at the droplet-scale to gain better insights into how various additives influence the performance of a given hypergolic pair.

Non-reaction collision of fuel droplet (MMH, white) with an oxidizer pool (NTO, red)

• Comparison with high velocity droplet impact experiment for liquid reaction rates
• Examination of interfacial mixing at high Weber numbers with gels and liquids
• Extensibility to different propellant combinations and chemistries

Dynamic mesh behavior during droplet collision with liquid reaction and evaporation. The mesh is colored based on the sum of all the refinement criterion (phase interfaces, reaction zones, specie gradients, and velocity curl)

• Dynamic meshing to capture phase interfaces and fine features without excessive computational cost
• Run-time load balancing to provide scalability for parallel execution
• Gas and liquid phase chemistry
• Evaporation and condensation
• Non-Newtonian viscosity models