An Investigation of Liquid Droplet Evaporation Model Used in Multiphase Flow Simulation

Modeling liquid droplet evaporation in a flow stream is very important in many engineering applications. It was discovered that the result of predicted droplet and main flow temperatures from using commercial codes sometimes presents unexplainable phenomena; for example, the droplet temperature drops too low. The objective of this study is to investigate the issues involved in the built-in droplet evaporation model by using three different approaches: (a) use the existing built-in correlations model in a commercial code, (b) use the lumped analytical analysis, and (c) actually solve the heat and mass transfer by directly using CFD without employing the built-in correlation model. In the third approach, the evaporation process is simulated by imposing water evaporation in a very thin layer at the surface of a stagnant water droplet; in the meantime, the evaporation energy is subtracted from the same place. This is performed by imposing a positive mass source term and a negative energy source term in a thin layer of cells wrapping around the droplet surface. The transport equations are then solved using the commercial CFD solver Ansys/Fluent to track the mass and energy transfer across the shell sides into the liquid droplet and out to the ambient. Unlike the built-in evaporation model in commercial codes, which assumes that all the evaporation energy (latent heat) is supplied by the droplet, in the direct CFD calculation, the evaporation energy is absorbed partly from the droplet and partly from the surrounding air according to the natural process based on the property values and the heat and mass transfer resistance inside and outside the droplet. The direct CFD result (without using evaporation correlation) is consistent with that of the lumped analytical analysis (2nd approach). During the development of the direct CFD calculation, several technical difficulties are overcome and discussed in detail in this paper. A revised equation is proposed to improve the existing built-in model in the current commercial code. Both the direct CFD method and the zero-dimensional lumped method show the droplet temperature always increases.