Numerical Simulation of a Transonic Gas-Droplet Two-Phase Flow over an Airfoil with a Droplet Breakup Model

Gas-particle two-phase flows are abundant in the practical engineering problems. A branch of application is involved with the solid particles such as dust cyclone, flight in the hail storm, detonation of the dusty gases in the coal mine and grain storage tank, etc. Another branch of applications happen in the gas-liquid droplet two-phase flows but it is somewhat strange that they have not been much solved in the literature. Examples of this flow are the aviation of a flight vehicle through the cloud, fuel spray combustion and pulse detonation engine. Numerical simulation of the gas flow with the liquid droplets is more difficult than the gas flow with the solid particles. The reason is simple: the liquid droplets are a deformable medium with surface tension, breakup, coalescence, evaporation and condensation. In the present paper, we numerically simulate the transonic flow of air-water droplet mixture over a NACA0012 airfoil: see Fig. 1.