Increasingly stringent regulations of pollutant emissions from aviation require rapid implementation of
novel combustion technologies. Promising concepts based on moderate or intense low-oxygen dilution
(MILD) combustion have been investigated in academia and industry. This MILD regime can be obtained
from the recirculation of the hot vitiated combustion products to raise the temperature of the reactants,
resulting in distributed reaction regions and lower flame temperatures. In the present work, we consider
the air-blast atomization of a kerosene spray in crossflow, which enables efficient mixing between fuel
and oxidizer. We investigate experimentally and numerically the effect of the spray air-to-liquid massflow ratio (ALR) variation on the reaction front and flame topology of a kerosene spray flame. The spray
is injected transversely into a turbulent vitiated crossflow composed of the products of a lean CH4-H2
flame. The spray flame thermal power is varied between 2.5 and 5 kW, along with the atomizer ALR
between 2 and 6. The experimental characterization of the reaction zone is performed using OH∗ chemiluminescence and OH and fuel planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF). The Large Eddy Simulations (LES)
of the multiphase reactive flow provide good agreement with the experimental observations. Experiments
and simulations show that the ALR governs mixing, resulting in different flame stabilization mechanisms
and combustion regimes. Low ALR results in a relatively small jet-to-crossflow momentum ratio and a
large spray Sauter mean diameter (SMD). A thick windward reaction region is formed due to inefficient
shear layer mixing between the fuel spray and the crossflow. Meanwhile, the correspondingly large spray
SMD leads to isolated penetration and localized combustion of fuel clusters. At high ALR, the higher penetration and the faster droplet evaporation due to the lower spray SMD result in an efficient entrainmentinduced mixing between the two streams, forming more distributed reaction regions.