COUPLING OF CLASSICAL LINEAR-THEORY AND MAXIMUM-ENTROPY FORMALISM FORPREDICTION OF DROP SIZE DISTRIBUTION IN SPRAYS - APPLICATION TO PRESSURE-SWIRL ATOMIZERS

There are very few theoretical approaches dealing with the prediction of drop size distribution in spray, and it is still impossible to eval uate this important spray characteristic from theoretical consideratio ns only. However; for the past 10 years the use of the maximum entropy formalism for this task has opened new directions of investigation. U nfortunately so far, applications of this formalism to predict drop si ze distributions have nel er made use of theoretical information only and required measured mean drop diameters. To overcome this problem, t he drop size distribution is here determined from a formalism based on the maximization of the entropy, the required information of which is brought by the classical linear theory. Thus, a procedure to determin e drop size distribution in sprays from theoretical considerations onl y is suggested and tested for a set of four swirl atomizers used with water. The agreement found between calculated and measured volume-base d distributions is very good.