Effects of turbulence modulation addition in OpenFOAM® toolkit on high pressure fuel sprays

The OpenFOAM® CFD methodology is nowadays employed for simulation in internal combustion engines and a lot of work has been done for an appropriate description of all complex phenomena. At the moment in the RANS turbulence models available in the OpenFOAM® toolbox the turbulence modulation is not yet included, and the present work analyze the predictive capabilities of the code in simulating high injection pressure fuel sprays after modeling the influence of the dispersed phase on the turbulence structure. Different experiments were employed for the validation. At first, non-evaporating diesel spray was considered in a constant volume and quiescent vessel. The validation was performed via the available experimental spray evolution in terms of penetrations and spatial/temporal fuel distributions. Then the Sandia combustion chamber was chosen for diesel spray simulation in non reacting conditions. The effect of turbulence modulation was analyzed in terms of liquid and vapor penetrations, turbulent viscosity and intensity adopting different sets of spray sub-models to evaluate the relative influence of turbulence modulation by varying atomization and breakup models.