The regimes of twin-fluid jet-in-crossflow at atmospheric and jet-engine operating conditions

The “Twin-Fluid Jet-in-Crossflow (TF-JICF)” is a nascent variation of the classical JICF, in which a liquid jet is co-injected with an annular sleeve of gas into a gaseous crossflow. Jet-engine designers are interested in using TF-JICF for liquid-fuel injection and atomization in the next-generation combustors because it is expected to minimize combustor-damaging auto-ignition and fuel-coking tendencies. However, experimental data of TF-JICF are sparse. Furthermore, a widely accepted TF-JICF model that correlates the spray’s penetration to the combined liquid-gas momentum-flux ratio (Jeff) is increasingly showing discrepancy with emerging results, suggesting a gap in the current understanding of TF-JICF. This paper describes an investigation that addressed the gap by experimentally characterizing the TF-JICF produced by a single injector across wide ranges of operating conditions (i.e., jet-A injectant, crossflow of air, crossflow Weber number = 175-1050, crossflow pressure Pcf = 1.8-9.5 atm, momentum-flux ratio J = 5-40, and air-nozzle dP = 0%-150% of Pcf). These covered the conditions previously used to develop the Jeff model, recently reported conditions that produced Jeff discrepancies, and high-pressure conditions found in jet-engines. Dye-based shadowgraph was used to acquire high-resolution (13.52 μm/pixel) images of the TF-JICF, which revealed wide-ranging characteristics such as the disrupted Rayleigh-Taylor jet instabilities, air-induced jet corrugations, spray-bifurcations, and prompt-atomization. Analyses of the data showed that contrary to the literature, the TF-JICF’s penetration is not monotonically related to Jeff. A new conceptual framework for TF-JICF is proposed, where the flow configuration is composed of four regimes, each having different penetration trends, spray structures, and underlying mechanisms.