Importance of Turbulence in High Velocity Flows Around Spherical Objects

This work deals with a preliminary investigation of the turbulent effects in a supersonic gaseous flow in order to estimate the importance of turbulence during the aerobreakup of a liquid droplet. For that the gaseous flow around a rigid sphere is investigated and regions of high turbulence are identified. The location of zones with high and low turbulence are compared to experiments of the process of aerobreakup out of the literature at similar Weber numbers.

With this preliminary investigation the importance of turbulence in the aerobreakup of liquid droplets could be estimated and good correspondence between results found in the simulations and experimental results out of the literature was found. In the next step the actual multiphase simulation will be carried out and phenomena found here will be investigated in the simulation of the liquid droplet, which is constantly deforming due to the supersonic gaseous flow.