Bag Film Breakup of Droplets in Uniform Airflows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel numerical simulation approach using the manifold death algorithm to study droplet bag breakup in airflow, achieving grid convergence and analyzing fragment mechanisms, with implications for air-sea interface physics.

Contribution

The study develops and applies the manifold death algorithm for simulating bag breakup, enabling grid convergence and detailed analysis of breakup mechanisms in multiphase flows.

Findings

Grid convergence of fragment statistics achieved with MD algorithm.

Bag film perforation thickness larger than experimental observations.

Non-monotonic relationship between bag fragment size and Ohnesorge number.

Abstract

We present novel numerical simulations investigating the bag breakup of liquid droplets. We first examine the viscous effect on drop deformation before the onset of bag breakup, comparing with theory and experiment. Next, a bag film forms at late time and is susceptible to spurious mesh-induced breakup in numerical simulations, which has prevented previous studies from reaching grid convergence of fragment statistics. We therefore adopt the manifold death (MD) algorithm which artificially perforates thin films once they reach a prescribed critical thickness independent of the grid size, controlled by a numerical parameter $L_{\rm sig}$. We show grid convergence of fragment statistics when utilising the MD algorithm, and analyse the fragment behaviour and bag film disintegration mechanisms including ligament breakup, node detachment and rim destabilisation. Our choice of the critical thickness parameter $L_{\rm sig}$ is limited by numerical constraints and thus has not been matched to experiment or theory; consequently, the current simulations yield critical bag film perforation thicknesses larger than experimentally observed. The influence of the MD algorithm configuration on the bag breakup phenomena and statistics will be investigated in future work. We also study the effects of moderate liquid Ohnesorge number ($0.005 \leq Oh \leq 0.05$) on the bag breakup process and fragment statistics, where a non-monotonic dependency of the average diameter of bag film fragments on $Oh$ is found. These results highlight the utility of the MD algorithm in multiphase simulations involving topological changes, and pave the way for physics-based numerical investigations into spume generation at the air-sea interface.