Thick exchange layer evaporation model with natural convection effect and evaporation experimental study for multicomponent droplet

In order to investigate the high-temperature evaporation characteristics of multicomponent liquid fuel, three kinds of blended fuel: n-heptane/n-decane/RP-3 aviation kerosene-ethanol were experimentally studied with and without forced convection. Further, based on zero-diffusion and infinite diffusion concept, this study expanded Thick Exchange Layer evaporation model with Natural Convection effect (NC-TEL) to multicomponent liquid fuels. The experimental results show that the droplet evaporation rate increases significantly with the increase of ambient temperature. Higher temperature leads to more significant relationships between the composition ratio and the evaporation rate. The effect of forced convection is not obviously under the circumstance in this paper. Then, the evaporation models were validated by experimental data. In general, the new NC-TEL model behaves better than the Ranz-Marshall (R-M) model, and the prediction accuracy at high temperature is improved by 8% to 35%. In lower temperature conditions, the prediction of zero-diffusion NC-TEL model is better than the infinite diffusion NC-TEL model. In high-temperature conditions, for n-heptane-ethanol droplet, the predictions of NC-TEL model are accurate, but for n-decane/RP-3 aviation kerosene-ethanol, the predictions are lower than experimental results. This may be caused by the micro-explosion phenomenon and the Marangoni phenomenon.