A ghost fluid method for compressible reacting flows with phase change

A modified interfacial Riemann problem accounting for phase change and surface tension was developed to couple a reacting gas to a vaporizing compressible liquid. Results from the proposed numerical method compare well with empirically measured separation locations over spheres, established heat-transfer correlations, and droplet deformation criterion. The numerical algorithms developed in this work are robust and applicable to a wide variety of highly transient compressible chemically reacting flows involving phase change. Computed example problems of shock wave and droplet interactions compare well with empirical measurements and show counterintuitive vaporization trends that are explainable from basic physical arguments. To the authors’ knowledge, this paper represents the first time in the open literature that a compressible reacting gas-dynamic flow has been directly coupled to a compressible cavitating liquid with vaporization using multi-fluid modeling techniques.