MARCH 6, 2002
High-pressure, high-speed fuel sprays are a critical technology for many applications including fuel injection systems, where the structure and dynamics of the fuel sprays is the key to increasing fuel efficiency and reducing pollutants. Because liquid sprays are difficult to image, high-pressure fuel sprays have never been considered as supersonic under typical fuel injection conditions. At SRI-CAT (the Advanced Photon Source) and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, synchrotron x-radiography and a fast x-ray detector were used to record the time evolution of transient fuel sprays from a high-pressure injector, capturing the propagation of spray-induced shock waves in a gaseous medium and revealing the complex nature of the spray hydrodynamics.