The aim of this paper is to study the effect of air coflow and air swirl on droplet dispersion in reacting sprays. Different optical techniques are used to characterize the spray droplets as well as to visualize the spray flame. The flame characteristics such as height, width and liftoff are found to be significantly affected due to the air co-flow, which strongly modifies the local droplet number density within the spray. Though, imparting swirl on the air coflow again redistributes the droplets resulting in wider and shorter flame. Since droplet often burn as a group rather than individually, characterization of droplet groups or clusters is important. This is achieved by identifying droplets on the Mie-scattering images followed by a statistical method in order to quantify the degree of clustering and estimate length scales of the droplet clusters. © 2018 Combustion Institute. All Rights Reserved.