Steady state Eulerian-Eulerian simulation of charged insulating liquid flows

An attempt has been made to model the transport of charge carriers in a hydrocarbon oil. The geometry modelled represents a `charge injection´ atomizer and operates by injecting electric charge from a sharp pointed electrode into a moving hydrocarbon oil that is to be sprayed. The current work added additional code, via user defined subroutines to a commercial computational fluid dynamics package, FLUENT. The extra code discretized the Poisson equation and a transport equation for the convection and diffusion of space charge by dual action of the bulk flow and the electric field. The coding additions were fully validated and sensible predictions were obtained without the space charge source term contributing to the electric potential calculation. However solutions with the space charge source could not be obtained. This is despite testing with much finer grids and a more accurate discretization scheme for the space charge transport. It is thought that the non-linear linkage between the voltage potential derived from the space charge and its transport is responsible