Experimental and molecular dynamics study on micro-explosion of water- in-diesel droplets in the presence of solid nanoparticles

MR Wei and SW Yang and GL Guo and B Yuan and S Wu and HL Ju and ZW Wang, APPLIED THERMAL ENGINEERING, 241, 122334 (2024).

DOI: 10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2024.122334

In recent years, multicomponent fuels have been widely studied; among them, dual fuels with different boiling points have attracted attention because of the micro-explosion phenomenon, which makes the mixing and combustion of diesel and air more complete. Strengthening the micro- explosion processes and further improving the degree of mixing of diesel and air is one of the core problems of micro-explosions. This study conducted experiments and molecular dynamics simulation to investigate this problem by adding nanoparticles to emulsified water-in-diesel droplets. First, the concept of puffing was proposed to describe the time and difficulties of bubble nucleation. Second, frequency distributions of a single micro-explosion intensity were proposed, and S-n diagrams comprising the cumulative micro-explosion intensity and total micro-explosion frequency were used to describe the micro- explosion intensity comprehensively. The results show that nanoparticles promote heat transfer between the droplets and high-temperature environments. Moreover, it weakens the potential energy between liquid water molecules and generates bubble nuclei around the nanoparticles, decreasing the bubble nucleation temperature and time and increasing bubble occurrence probability. Furthermore, the microexplosion mode gradually shifts from low frequency (intensity) to medium frequency (intensity) with increasing carbon nanoparticle concentration.

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