Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / A constant-volume combustor is used to investigate the ignition initiated by a traversing jet of reactive hot gas, in support of combustion engine applications that include novel wave-rotor constant-volume combustion gas turbines and pre-chamber IC engines. The hot-jet ignition constant-volume combustor rig at the Combustion and Propulsion Research Laboratory at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) was used for this study. Lean premixed combustible mixture in a rectangular cuboid constant-volume combustor is ignited by a hot-jet traversing at different fixed speeds. The hot jet is issued via a converging nozzle from a cylindrical pre-chamber where partially combusted products of combustion are produced by spark- igniting a rich ethylene-air mixture. The main constant-volume combustor (CVC) chamber uses methane-air, hydrogen-methane-air and ethylene-air mixtures in the lean equivalence ratio range of 0.8 to 0.4. Ignition delay times and ignitability of these combustible mixtures as affected by jet traverse speed, equivalence ratio, and fuel type are investigated in this study.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study seeks to improve the understanding of inlet conditions of a large rotor-stator cavity in a turbofan engine, often referred to as the drive cone cavity (DCC). The inlet flow is better understood through a higher fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of the inlet to the cavity, and a coupled finite element (FE) thermal to CFD fluid analysis of the cavity in order to accurately predict engine component temperatures. Accurately predicting temperature distribution in the cavity is important because temperatures directly affect the material properties including Young's modulus, yield strength, fatigue strength, creep properties. All of these properties directly affect the life of critical engine components. In addition, temperatures cause thermal expansion which changes clearances and in turn affects engine efficiency. The DCC is fed from the last stage of the high pressure compressor. One of its primary functions is to purge the air over the rotor wall to prevent it from overheating. Aero-thermal conditions within the DCC cavity are particularly challenging to predict due to the complex air flow and high heat transfer in the rotating component. Thus, in order to accurately predict metal temperatures a two-way coupled CFD-FE analysis is needed. Historically, when the cavity airflow is modeled for engine design purposes, the inlet condition has been over-simplified for the CFD analysis which impacts the results, particularly in the region around the compressor disc rim. The inlet is typically simplified by circumferentially averaging the velocity field at the inlet to the cavity which removes the effect of pressure wakes from the upstream rotor blades. The way in which these non-axisymmetric flow characteristics affect metal temperatures is not well understood. In addition, a constant air temperature scaled from a previous analysis is used as the simplified cavity inlet air temperature. Therefore, the objectives of this study are: (a) model the DCC cavity with a more physically representative inlet condition while coupling the solid thermal analysis and compressible air flow analysis that includes the fluid velocity, pressure, and temperature fields; (b) run a coupled analysis whose boundary conditions come from computational models, rather than thermocouple data; (c) validate the model using available experimental data; and (d) based on the validation, determine if the model can be used to predict air inlet and metal temperatures for new engine geometries. Verification with experimental results showed that the coupled analysis with the 3D no-bolt CFD model with predictive boundary conditions, over-predicted the HP6 offtake temperature by 16k. The maximum error was an over-prediction of 50k while the average error was 17k. The predictive model with 3D bolts also predicted cavity temperatures with an average error of 17k. For the two CFD models with predicted boundary conditions, the case without bolts performed better than the case with bolts. This is due to the flow errors caused by placing stationary bolts in a rotating reference frame. Therefore it is recommended that this type of analysis only be attempted for drive cone cavities with no bolts or shielded bolts.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Ignition of a combustible mixture by a transient jet of hot reactive gas is important for safety of mines, pre-chamber ignition in IC engines, detonation initiation, and in novel constant-volume combustors. The present work is a numerical study of the hot-jet ignition process in a long constant-volume combustor (CVC) that represents a wave-rotor channel. The mixing of hot jet with cold mixture in the main chamber is first studied using non-reacting simulations. The stationary and traversing hot jets of combustion products from a pre-chamber is injected through a converging nozzle into the main CVC chamber containing a premixed fuel-air mixture. Combustion in a two-dimensional analogue of the CVC chamber is modeled using global reaction mechanisms, skeletal mechanisms, and detailed reaction mechanisms for four hydrocarbon fuels: methane, propane, ethylene, and hydrogen. The jet and ignition behavior are compared with high-speed video images from a prior experiment. Hybrid turbulent-kinetic schemes using some skeletal reaction mechanisms and detailed mechanisms are good predictors of the experimental data. Shock-flame interaction is seen to significantly increase the overall reaction rate due to baroclinic vorticity generation, flame area increase, stirring of non-uniform density regions, the resulting mixing, and shock compression. The less easily ignitable methane mixture is found to show higher ignition delay time compared to slower initial reaction and greater dependence on shock interaction than propane and ethylene. The confined jet is observed to behave initially as a wall jet and later as a wall-impinging jet. The jet evolution, vortex structure and mixing behavior are significantly different for traversing jets, stationary centered jets, and near-wall jets. Production of unstable intermediate species like C2H4 and CH3 appears to depend significantly on the initial jet location while relatively stable species like OH are less sensitive. Inclusion of minor radical species in the hot-jet is observed to reduce the ignition delay by 0.2 ms for methane mixture in the main chamber. Reaction pathways analysis shows that ignition delay and combustion progress process are entirely different for hybrid turbulent-kinetic scheme and kinetics-only scheme.