Aerodynamic breakup of submillimeter drops in high-speed flows*

Aerobreakup of liquid drops are important to many droplet applications, such as fuel injection. When a liquid drop is subjected to a gas stream of high velocity, the drop can deform and break into small droplets. The drop aerobreakup is controlled by multiple dimensionless parameters. The Weber number (We) has been commonly used to characterize the different breakup regimes. While the effects of Weber and Ohnesorge numbers on the aerobreakup of a drop in unbounded domain have been extensively studied, the effect of the Reynolds number (Re) based on gas properties are less understood and will be investigated through detailed numerical simulations in the present paper. Attention will be focused on the moderate We regime, where the drop mostly breaks in the bag mode. In previous studies for millimeter drops, Re is too large to be relevant. However, for applications where drops are small and the relative velocity is high, Re can be quite small when the drop breaks. Parametric simulations of Re and We are performed to systematically investigate the effect of Re on the drop aerobreakup dynamics. The simulations are performed using the Basilisk solver, where the mass-momentum consistent VOF method is used to capture the interfacial dynamics on an adaptive mesh. The reduced Re is found to induce significant changes in the drop acceleration, deformation, bag morphology, and the bag breakup dynamics, which in turn lead to significant variation in the size and spatial distributions of the children droplets formed.