Many Drops Interactions II: Simulation of Coalescence, Flocculation and Fragmentation of Multiple Colliding Drops with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a Lagrangian mesh-free formalism and has been useful to model continuous fluid. This formalism is employed to solve the Navier-Stokes equations by replacing the fluid with a set of particles. These particles are interpolation points from which properties of the fluid can be determined. In this study, the SPH method is applied to simulate the hydrodynamics interaction of many drops, showing some settings for the coalescence, fragmentation and flocculation problem of equally sized liquid drops in three-dimensional spaces. For small velocities the drops interact only through their deformed surfaces and the flocculation of the droplets arises. This result is very different if the collision velocity is large enough for the fragmentation of droplets takes place. We observe that for velocities around 15 mm/ms the coalescence of droplets occurs. The velocity vector fields formed inside the drops during the collision process are shown.