Numerical Investigation of Collision-Induced Breakup of Raindrops. Part I: Methodology and Dependencies on Collision Energy and Eccentricity

Abstract

Binary collisions of large raindrops moving with terminal fall velocity are numerically investigated using FS3D, a direct numerical simulation (DNS) code based on the ?volume of fluid? method. The result of this process can be a permanent coalescence or a temporal coalescence followed by a breakup of the coalesced system into smaller-sized remnants of the original raindrops and a number of fragment droplets of different sizes. In total, 32 drop pairs are studied with sizes chosen to cover nearly completely the entire size parameter range relevant to breakup. This is an important extension of investigations performed in 1982 by Low and List, who studied 10 drop pairs only. Moreover, eccentricity has been introduced as an additional parameter controlling the collision outcome. Eccentricity is defined as the horizontal distance of the initial drops? centers with values equal to approximately 0 for centric and 1 for grazing collisions. The main results include numerically calculated data of coalescence efficiencies and fragment size distributions with emphasis on eccentricity effects. It is shown that eccentricity largely determines the appearance of specific breakup modes and consequently the respective fragment size distributions. Comparisons are made with the main findings of Low and List. Coalescence efficiency values larger than those derived by Low and List show up for very small Weber numbers. Additionally, the existence of their definite limit value of collision kinetic energy necessary for coalescence could not be confirmed. The fragment size distributions are in some cases similar to those measured by Low and List but there are also major differences for other cases. The presented results are used for parameterizations of coalescence efficiencies and fragment size distributions as well as for calculations of stationary drop spectra shown in Part II of this study.