Extraction of droplet genealogies from high-fidelity atomization simulations

Abstract

Many research groups are performing high-fidelity simulations of atomizing jets that are taking advantage of the continually increasing computational resources and advances in numerical methods. These high-fidelity simulations produce extremely large data-sets characterizing the flow and giving the ability to gather a better understanding of atomization. One of the main challenges with these data sets is their large size, which requires developing tools to extract relevant physics from them. The main goal of this project is to create a physics extraction technique to compute the genealogy of atomization. This information will characterize the process of the coherent liquid core breaking into droplets and ligaments which may proceed to break up further. This event information will be combined with detailed information such as droplet size, shape, flow field characteristics, etc. The extracted information will be stored in a database, allowing the information to be readily and quickly queried to assist in the development and testing of low-fidelity atomization models that agree with the physics predicted by high-fidelity simulations.