Numerical and experimental study of wire mesh in the swirl effervescent atomization

Effervescent atomization is widely used in industrial, agricultural, and national defense fields because of its low energy consumption. Quality improvement to spray has been pursued for decades as an important goal without increasing energy consumption. To investigate the relationship between the internal flow and spray characteristic, a swirl effervescent atomizer coupled with a wire mesh was designed in this paper. The effect of wire mesh on spray characteristics and internal flow with different structural parameters was investigated. The experimental results showed that the spray quality (small droplet diameter and stable atomization) was improved by installing a wire mesh in the mixing chamber. The droplet diameter decreased first and then increased with the increase in the effective porosity of the wire mesh, and Sauter mean diameter decreased from 23.1 to 20 μm. Moreover, this study adopts the simulation to explore the influence of bubble size on the spray droplet in the mixing chamber. The simulation results showed that as the effective porosity of the wire mesh increases, the proportion of small-scale bubbles (the bubble diameter Db ≤ 1 mm) increased from 11.3% to 83.37%, resulting in reduced spray droplet diameter. Notably, the number of small-scale bubbles increases first and then decreases, and the mean pressure drops decline.