A Lennard-Jones based surface tension analogy model for liquid breakup

The breakup of liquid drops is an important phenomenology for many applications. We approach this problem with the objective of improving methods for modeling the impulse and impact dispersal of liquids in transportation accident scenarios. These scenarios can be distinguished from many other simpler problems due to the quantity of liquid and the complexity of the intermediate liquid morphology. These differences necessitate alternative (lower computational cost and lower fidelity) approaches to the problem compared to much of the historical modeling work. This work leverages a recently implemented model for inter-particle forces in a Lagrangian/Eulerian computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. The inter-particle force model is inspired by molecular dynamics methods. It employs a Lennard-Jones (LJ) attractive force and a spring-based repulsive force that is governed by LJ parameters. The LJ parameters are related to the bulk fluid properties through a theoretical relationship to the surface tension. Methods are developed for modifying the single particle aerodynamic drag term, depending on the new notion of particle connectivity. These methods are evaluated for potential utilization in practical simulations. Breakup experiments for drops in flows from prior studies suggest a critical Weber number relating to the onset of breakup for a drop. These data are replicated with the proposed model and it is shown that the proposed method can reasonably reproduce aspects of breakup for a range of scales with only a single tuned parameter.