Investigation of liquid n-heptane/air spray detonation with an Eulerian-Eulerian model

A two-dimensional numerical simulation of detonation in a reactive dispersed liquid droplet cloud is per-formed with an Eulerian-Eulerian method. This study aims to investigate the model and the effects of two-phase sub-models on the propagation of a detonation through an n-heptane spray. Firstly, the simu-lations are compared to the experiments conducted in the thesis of Mohamed El-Amine Benmahammed [1]. Three simulations are carried out for a mono-dispersed/one sample cloud of droplets with a mass corresponding to equivalence ratios of 0.8, 1.0, and 1.3. The Eulerian-Eulerian method predicted the ex-perimental detonation velocity and gaseous phase thermodynamic properties with reasonable accuracy. Secondly, an investigation of the effects of the mobilization of the droplet size poly-dispersity on the detonation properties was carried out. For a droplet Sauter mean diameter of 30 pm, the effect of the number of droplet samples used for modeling the poly-dispersity modifies the front structure and deto-nation properties. For instance, comparing 15 samples of droplet size to a unique sample, the detonation velocity decreases by 2.0 % , and the mean detonation cell width increases by 10 % .(c) 2022 The Combustion Institute. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.