This experimental investigation concerns the effect of imposed axial acoustic velocity fluctuations on the primary atomization of a hollow cone liquid sheet in the presence of a strong air swirl. The atomization dynamics are elucidated by positioning the spray at an acoustic velocity node, antinode, and a mixed point in the standing wave field generated due to the imposed axial acoustic excitation. High-speed shadowgraph images acquired in-sync with dynamic pressure measurements are processed to clarify the unstable behavior observed in the spray dynamics; this was achieved by extracting key parameters such as breakup length, spatial growth rates, phase differences, and by employing Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD). A novel method to obtain the breakup length of a hollow cone spray from the position of maximum wave amplitude is presented. The breakup length is the smallest for the mixed point. The phase difference between the left and right half-angle fluctuations shows that the flapping motion of the spray is predominantly observed at the mixed point for different air-to-liquid ratios. Another novel approach is adopted to identify the physical mechanisms corresponding to each POD spatial mode by comparing POD spatial modes obtained from experiments to those generated artificially.
