Microscopic characteristics of impinging spray sliced by a cone structure under increased injection pressures

Abstract Wall-impingement is a serious problem for engine research owing to the possible source of hydrocarbons and soot emission. Therefore, impinging spray becomes the hotpot for investigation, especially for the microscopic characteristics. Droplet behaviors are significantly important to evaluate the atomization for predicting the impingement phenomena, such as stick, spread or splash. Many studies on it for both gasoline and diesel engines were published. However, these researches failed to capture the droplet behaviors clearly in the dense region owing to the overlap of the droplets. Only periphery or far field of the spray was tested. Therefore, a special cone structure named “spray slicer” was designed to cut the spray before observation with the consideration of good observation and less effect on droplet velocity. The experiment was conducted in a constant volume chamber under increased injection pressures between 10 and 30 MPa. Heptane was used as the surrogate fuel injected by a mini-sac injector with a single hole. Microscopic behaviors were recorded by particle image analysis (PIA) method to obtain the droplets size, velocity and minimum distance (Md). Results showed that microscopic behaviors can be observed clearly at different locations. Sauter mean diameter (SMD) and mean velocity decrease with spray development, and the smallest values occur at the periphery. Md increases with spray development owing to better dispersion. Moreover, high injection pressure decreases the droplet size but increases the velocity and Md at a certain degree.