Transient heating and evaporation of moving mono-component liquid fuel droplets

• A droplet evaporation model addressing internal heat/mass transfer is developed.
• The model is developed in a generic 3D framework and presented in a repeatable way.
• The code is validated by evaporation data of n-Heptane and n-Decane droplets.
• The model can be readily and reliably extended for more generic applications.

This paper presents a complete description of a model for transient heating and evaporation of moving mono-component liquid fuel droplets. The model mainly consists of gas phase heat and mass transfer analysis, liquid phase analysis, and droplet dynamics analysis, which address the interaction between the moving droplets and free-stream flow, the flow and heat and mass transfer within the droplets, and the droplet dynamics and size, respectively. For the liquid phase analysis, the droplets are discretized into a number of control volumes along the radial, polar and azimuthal directions, on each of which the flow and energy transport equations are numerically solved using the finite volume method. The computer code for the model is developed in a generic 3D framework and verified in different ways (e.g., by comparison against analytical solutions for simplified cases, and against experimental or modelling results of heating and evaporation of n-Heptane and n-Decane droplets in literature), so that the model can be readily and reliably extended to more generic applications (e.g., heating and evaporation of multi-component liquid fuel droplets, thermochemical conversion of commercially available biomass pellets).