Badar, A. F. AN EXAMINATION OF THE MAXIMUM ENTROPY APPROACH FOR MODELING THE PRODUCTS OF HYDRODYNAMIC BREAKUP. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2024.
| The maximum entropy formalism (MEF) is an attractive approach to predict the size and velocity distributions of daughter droplets resulting from post-primary atomization be- cause it is based on satisfying physical conservation laws. However, a critical examination of the method shows that the instantaneous formulation of the method offers mixed re- sults in regards to the prediction of post-primary atomization statistics due to a multitude of reasons. Firstly, the instantaneous formulation of the MEF cannot predict the multi- modal nature and general shape of droplet size distributions as evidenced by experimen- tally obtained size distributions for isolated droplet breakup in the literature. Secondly, it over-predicts velocity distributions of daughter droplets because of its inability to capture the temporal nature of the breakup process. Efforts to improve the velocity predictions by the MEF through a variation of the parameters in its formulation show little improvement. Nonetheless, the introduction of external models to account for the finite-time breakup of a droplet in the MEF model are recommended for the use of the model for predicting post-primary atomization statistics. |