Marco Crialesi Esposito (KTH) - Study of turbulent atomization in round liquid jets

Sprays and atomization processes are extremely common both in nature and in industrial applications. In turbulent atomization, liquid breakup/coalescence events are tightly coupled with the underlying turbulence field, leading to extremely complex and multiscale scenarios. In this presentation,  discuss the methodology used to study turbulent sprays. First, we will discuss the turbulence field and how to treat discontinuities in material properties in order to compute the Kolmogorov scaling in spectra. Then, we show how to examine atomization patterns by means of a topological, point-process characterization of droplets. Finally, these analysis tools are applied to the study of two simulations of round atomizing liquid jets, focusing on the effect of different inlet boundary conditions, consisting of isotropic and anisotropic turbulent structures. The study shows that anisotropic structures at the inlet lead to an earlier breakup and a overall more developed turbulent field. On the other hand, the statistical characterization of atomization shows extremely similar behavior for the two cases, opening interesting prospectives on the usage of point-processes in the study of turbulent sprays.