A Close-up on OsciJet’s Ingenious Spray Formation
How does the OsciJet nozzle gain its performance? To get to he bottom of this question, a joint collaboration of the TU Berlin and FDX Fluid Dynamix GmbH performed high fidelity experiments and simulations to reveal the physical mechanisms that lead to breakup and droplet formation of a liquid stream emanating from the nozzle. As for all sorts of sprays, the development hydrodynamic instabilities play are a critical part in the breakup process as they lead to the destabilization of the liquid surface of the stream. In the OsciJet spray, the development of these instabilities is amplified by the oscillation the nozzle produces. This helps to effectively atomize the liquid into droplets and spread them over a wide area.
The results have been published in the Journal „Physics of Fluids“: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5029772
Spray Simulation
Employing heavy numerical simulations of sprays helps understanding the underlying droplet formation mechanisms. The video on the right shows an rendered animation of such a spray simulation. The jet enters the domain from the left and breaks up under the influence of hydrodynamic instabilities. The simulation was performed on a supercomputer on 80 CPU cores and took about one and a half months to compute.
Update (08/03/2018)
We are thrilled that our publication was chosen for the cover of the Physics of Fluids journal.