The three-dimensional development of instabilities and the subsequent spray formation in a gas-liquid mixing layer are important fundamental problems in the area of multiphase flows. It is highly desirable to visualize this detailed atomization process and to analyze the instabilities and mechanisms involved, and massive numerical simulations are required, in addition to experiment. Rapid development of numerical methods and computer technology in the past decade now allows large-scale three-dimensional direct numerical simulations of atomization to be performed. Nevertheless, the fundamental question, whether all the physical scales involved in the primary breakup process are faithfully resolved, has eluded researchers until now. In the present study, we conduct direct numerical simulations of spray formation in a gas-liquid mixing layer with state-of-the-art computational resources (using up to $4\times {10}^9$ cells and $16384$ cores), in order to obtain a high-fidelity numerical closeup of the detailed mechanisms of spray formation. We also aim to examine whether present computational resources are sufficient for a fully resolved direct numerical simulation of atomization.

• Received 18 July 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.2.014005