Abstract
The early stages of the shock-driven explosion of liquid-water microdrops are studied numerically with a high-resolution discretization of the axisymmetric Euler equations. A level-set based conservative interface-interaction method is extended to allow for phase transition. The method is applied to a configuration that has been investigated in recent experiments [Stan et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 966 (2016); Stan et al., J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 7, 2055 (2016)]. The presented results show that the numerical model predicts the initial stages of the violent liquid-drop explosion dynamics accurately. Our results indicate that the deformation of the cylindrical vapor cavity within the droplet is not induced by a torus-shaped negative-pressure wave as was implied from the experimental data. We rather find that this torus-shaped wave is a shock wave, and that the observed vapor-cavity deformation is caused by interaction with a negative-pressure region preceding the torus shock. The simulation results show deviations from experimental results at later stages when the drop deformation is dominated by off-center cavitation, i.e., by effects that require extension of the underlying model to take into account generalized nucleation and recondensation.
7 More- Received 5 July 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.4.044003
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society