ILASS Americas, 24 th Annual Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems, San Antonio, TX, May 2012 Evaluation of Cavitation in a Liquid-Liquid Ejector Carsten Mehring * Central Engineering, Parker Aerospace 16666 Von Karman Avenue Irvine, CA 92606-4917 USA Abstract This paper summarizes the numerical analysis of a liquid-liquid ejector pump with focus on the accuracy of the em- ployed cavitation model and in view of its potential application as a dual- or multi-liquid mixing and injection sys- tem. While the use of gas-phase or gas/liquid-phase ejection systems has found wide application in gas/hybrid burners and scrubbers for air pollution control; the use of liquid-phase ejectors for the mixing and preparation of different liquids and additives prior to atomization or other processing steps is not common place. As a metered-delivery and mixing device, the ejector system has to be properly designed in order to omit onset of cavitation within the em- ployed working fluids and across the system operating range. Cavitation would not only impact ejector perfor- mance, it could also affect steady-state flow conditions and result in poor mixing of the liquid phases which can af- fect the quality of the subsequent processing steps. In order to utilize CFD analysis as part of the design process for the prescribed system, it is important that the em- ployed cavitation model accurately predicts onset and extend of cavitation within the system. As a first step, the pre- sent work focuses on the numerical analysis of a liquid fuel ejector pump over a range of operating conditions and including onset of cavitation. The analysis is carried out by employing ANSYS/CFX v13.0 with its implementation of the Rayleigh-Plesset cavitation model. Comparison with empirical data shows that, the numerical analysis accurately tracks ejector performance and the employed cavitation model accurately predicts the onset of cavitation within the ejector. The relevance of dissolved gases and viscous stresses on the cavitating ejector flow is discussed. * Corresponding author: Carsten.Mehring@Parker.com