Hi, I am a student looking to purchase a CFD package. My project includes modeling water droplets as they come out of a sprinkler nozzle and land on the ground. I have never used a CFD package, so I am not sure what exactly I need. If you could give me any keywords for what I am looking for in a CFD package or a software product that you think would work best for me, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!!!

abentow@hmc.edu

Depends. What exactly do you want in your solution? Are you looking to use a correlation for the water drops or do you want to simulate the whole process? If you do want to simulate the whole process then may want to use say an interface tracking code. Type Zaleski, lmm, SURFER in www.google.com. It will take you to a free source code. Its limited, ie. its a square box with few boundary conditions but its free and you can develop it.

Commercial software can't do interface tracking for water-air situations with large surface tension and density ratios. Well, no code can. It gives you results but they aren't right. The problem is determining the surface tension force. And since your droplets are small your surface tension force should be significant.

I hope this helps.