Two-Phase Shear Layers and Liquid Sheet in an Airstream in the Compressible Regime

AMS Seminar Series

Speaker: Zoe Barbeau, Flow Physics and Aeroacoustics Laboratory, Stanford University
Time: November 5, 2026, 9:00 a.m. PDT

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Abstract

Atomization is the process of break-up of a liquid sheet or jet co-flowing with air streams into a collection of droplets with a wide range of applications from industrial to power generation. The application of interest is air-blast atomization, relevant to fuel injection, where the co-flowing airstream is at high speeds where compressibility may affect atomization. This presentation covers the extension of a high-order compact finite difference framework to compressible, two-phase flows for simulation of atomization and the study of temporal two-phase shear layers and liquid sheets in an airstream. The effect of compressibility on two-phase shear layers and liquid sheets in an airstream is examined in the linear regime through linear stability analysis and by simulation with the compact scheme framework in the nonlinear regime. In contrast to behavior of compressible, single phase shear layers, no significant suppression effect with increasing compressibility is observed at high densities for the two-phase shear layer in the linear and nonlinear regime. Effects of parameters such as density ratio, gas flow Reynolds number, and Weber number on the atomization behavior are also explored.

Biography

Zoe Barbeau was a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University within the Flow Physics and Aeroacoustics Laboratory, where her research focused on high-order numerical methods, high-performance computing, multiphase flows, and atomization. She earned her B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Central Florida, her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and after successfully defending her Ph.D. in October 2026, she will soon be joining the Computational Aerosciences Branch at NASA Ames Research Center. Her professional experience includes multiple internships at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, where she specialized in GPU-accelerated particle methods and high energy density physics. She has been recognized as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an Astronaut Scholar.

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