Droplet spatial distribution in a spray under evaporating and reacting conditions

In order to study spray combustion, an experimental test rig was developed at ONERA to partially characterize the flow conditions inside the combustion chamber of a gas turbine. Experimental campaigns using laser-based diagnostics were performed to provide an experimental database under reacting and non-reacting conditions. The paper first describes the Mie scattering image-processing to detect the droplets in the spray, and to calculate 2D maps of droplet number density and mean inter-droplet distance. The method is subsequently used to investigate the spray behavior under both reacting and non-reacting conditions according to global-averaging and phase-averaging methods. Experimental findings on the spatial droplet distribution in the spray are compared to the simple regular grid distribution and the Hertz–Chandrasekhar distribution. Results show that, under both conditions, there is an affine relationship between the inverse square root of the mean droplet number density and the nearest-neighbor inter-droplet distance. Moreover, observations suggest that the droplet spatial distribution fits more closely to a Hertz–Chandrasekhar distribution than a simple regular grid distribution, which may bring new insight for spray modeling.