Criterion for heat transfer modeling of unsteady droplet combustion

Abstract

A criterion is developed which determines the unsteady temperature modeling of a single spherical fuel droplet burning in a nonconvective environment: the lumped (temporally varying but spatially uniform droplet temperature) -and distributed (temporally and spatially varying droplet temperature) -parameter models. It is concluded that for most industrial cases the distributed-parameter approach should be employed since the lumped-parameter one can not yield sufficiently accurate prediction.