A multispectral, extinction-based diagnostic for drop sizing in optically dense diesel sprays

Diesel sprays present a challenging environment for detailed quantitative measurement of the liquid field, and to date, there have been only a few efforts to characterize drop sizes within the family of Engine Combustion Network (ECN) diesel sprays. Drop sizing diagnostics, including optical microscopy and Ultra-Small Angle X-ray Scattering (USAXS), have been recently demonstrated in Spray A/D ECN activities, but little data exist to validate these results. This work therefore seeks to extend the available ECN data on the liquid phase field and provide a new comparative data set for assessment of previous ECN drop sizing measurements. In particular, this work presents the development of a two-wavelength, line-of-sight extinction measurement to examine liquid volume fraction and the corresponding droplet field in high-pressure fuel sprays. Here, extinction of lasers emitting at 10.6 μm and 0.633 μm are used for the measurement. To enable quantification of the liquid field in optically dense regions of the spray, a transfer function is developed to account for the influence of multiple scattering. The developed diagnostic is then applied to n-dodecane sprays from the ECN Spray A and Spray D injectors at varying fuel rail pressures and atmospheric chamber condition. Overall, the results show a reasonable agreement with droplet sizes measured using USAXS, as well as from more recent measurements using a Scattering-Absorption Measurement Ratio (SAMR) technique also developed in our group. This is particularly the case near the spray periphery, where on average, less than 40% difference in the measured Sauter mean diameter is observed. Nonetheless, an apparent discrepancy is observed between drop sizes from different diagnostics close to the jet centerline (i.e. nearly 100% difference between available data for Spray D injector). Moreover, the presented diagnostic shows an improved capability in the dilute regions of the spray, where x-ray-based diagnostics are generally subject to high noise and low signal sensitivity.