Numerical study of droplet fragmentation during impact on mesh screens

When a high-speed droplet impacts on mesh screens, part of the droplet penetrates the screen through its pores and generates smaller secondary drops, which spray downstream in a conical distribution. This instantaneous phase fragmentation phenomenon has been widely utilized in liquid spray applications and multiple-phase liquid separation. During droplet deformation, the intense liquid–gas fragmentation can lead to high nonequilibrium effect, which makes it hard to simulate by traditional fluid computational method. In this study, for the first time, we provided a numerical method to simulate the entire process of penetration dynamic behaviors. This 3D droplet-impact model based on MDPD (many-body dissipative particle dynamics) method exhibits high stability. A special solid–liquid boundary condition was proposed and successfully reduced the massive computational resources wasted on the solid mesh surface. To verify our model, the impacting of a droplet on a flat surface and on a mesh screen were simulated, respectively. The result showed a good match with our previous drop impact study and our experiment of the whole process about a droplet fragmented into hundreds of small drops. We further studied the mass transfer ratio (the ratio of penetrated drops to the initial droplet) and the ejection angle (the angle of the spray cone). The mass transfer ratio and ejection angle can be approximated as a function of Weber number, solid fraction and mesh number by summarizing the regular drop-penetrated behaviors over initial speed and mesh number.