Master of Science / Department of Animal Sciences and Industry / Terry A. Houser / Nursery age pigs (n=198) were used to evaluate the difference in the occurrence of injection site abscesses between needle-free jet injection and conventional needle-and-syringe injection systems. Pigs were fed for 21 d prior to treatment administration to acclimate the pigs to the environment of the Kansas State University Segregated Early Weaning (SEW) unit. On d 21 each pig was injected with aluminum hydroxide adjuvant in the neck and ham with needle-free jet injection (Pulse Needle-Free Systems, Lenexa, KS) and conventional needle-and-syringe injection. Needle-free and conventional needle-and-syringe injections were randomly assigned to pig side yielding a total of 396 injections per treatment with a total of 792 injections sites. Immediately prior to injection, the external surface of the injection sites were contaminated with an inoculum of Arcanobacterium pyogenes, a bacterium commonly associated with livestock abscesses. The pigs were then fed for a period of 27 or 28 d. On d 27 or d 28 the pigs were humanely euthanized and sent to the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratory where necropsies were performed and the injection sites harvested for histopathological evaluation. The needle-free jet injection system was associated with more injection site abscesses than the conventional needle-and-syringe injection method for both neck (P=0.0625) and ham (P=0.0313) injection sites. Twelve abscesses were found at injection sites administered via needle-free jet injection method while only 1 abscess was found with the conventional needle-and-syringe injection method. 5 abscesses were found at the neck injection sites and 8 abscesses were found at ham injection sites. There were no significant differences seen in tissue granulation resulting from reaction to the adjuvant. In summary, the implementation of needle-free jet injection systems in market hog production will be beneficial to eliminate needles and needle fragments in meat products but, when in the presence of Arcanobacterium pyogenes, it may increase the occurrence of injection site abscesses in pork carcasses that will need to be trimmed in pork processing plants. Although more abscesses were associated with needle-free jet injection, their occurrence was observed at a very low rate given that all injection sites were intentionally contaminated prior to injection.

For flights beyond Mach 6 ramjets are inefficient engines due to huge total pressure loss in the normal shock systems, combustion conditions that lose a large fraction of the available chemical energy due to dissociation and high structural loads. However if the flow remains supersonic inside the combustion chamber, the above problems could be alleviated and here the concept of SCRAMJET(supersonic combustion ramjet) comes into existence. The scramjets could reduce launching cost of satellites by carrying only fuel and ingesting oxygen from atmospheric air. Further applications could involve defense and transcontinental hypersonic transport. In the current study an effort is made to achieve supersonic combustion in a ground based short duration test facility(combustion driven shock-tunnel), which in addition to flight Mach number can simulate flight Reynolds number as well. In this study a simple method of injection i.e. wall injection of the fuel into the combustion chamber is used. The work starts with threedimensional numerical simulation of a non-reacting gas(air) injection into a hypersonic cross-flow of air to determine the conditions in which air penetrates reasonably well into the cross-flow. Care is taken so that the process does not induce huge pressure loss due to the bow shock which appears in front of the jet column. The code is developed in-house and parallelized using OpenMp model. This is followed by experiments on air injection into a hypersonic cross-flow of air in a conventional shock-tunnel HST2 existing in IISc. The most tricky part is synchronization of injection with start of test-flow in such a short duration(test time 1 millisecond) facility. Next part focuses on numerical simulations to determine the free-stream conditions, mainly the temperature and pressure of air, so that combustion takes place when hydrogen is injected into a supersonic cross-flow of air. The simulations are two-dimensional and includes species conservation equations and source terms due to chemical reactions in addition to the Navier-Stokes equations. This code is also built in-house and parallelized because of more number of operations with the inclusion of species conservation equations and chemical non-equilibrium. However, the predicted conditions were not achievable by HST2 due to low stagnation conditions of HST2. Therefore, a new shock-tunnel which could produce the required conditions is built. The new tunnel is a combustion driven shock-tunnel in which the driver gas is at higher temperature than conventional shock-tunnel. The driver gas is basically a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen and helium at a mole ratio of 2:1:10 initially. The mixture is ignited by spark plugs and the hydrogen and oxygen reacts releasing heat. The heat released raises the temperature of the mixture which is now predominantly helium and small fractions of water vapour and some radicals. The composition of the driver gas and initial pressure are determined through numerical simulations. Experiments follow in the new tunnel on hydrogen injection into a region of supersonic cross-flow between two parallel plates with a wedge attached to the bottom plate. The wedge reduces the hypersonic free-stream to Mach 2. A high-speed camera monitors the flow domain around injection point and sharp rise in luminosity is observed. To ascertain whether the luminosity is due to combustion or not, two more driven gases namely nitrogen and oxygen-rich air are used and the luminosity is compared. In the first case, the free-stream contains no oxygen and luminosity is not observed whereas in the second case higher luminosity than air driver case is visible. Additionally heat-transfer rates are measured at the downstream end of the model and at a height midway between the plates. Similar trend is observed in the relative heat-transfer rates. Wall static pressure at a location downstream of injection port is also measured and compared with numerical simulations. Results of numerical simulations which are carried out at the same conditions as of experiments confirm combustion at supersonic speed. Experiments and numerical simulations show presence of supersonic combustion in the setup. However, further study is necessary to optimize the parameters so that thrust force could be generated efficiently.

To quench a thermal runaway reaction in a chemical rector, an efficient approach is the introduction of a small quantity of a liquid inhibiting agent, named a “killer”, into the mixing vessel. In this thesis, an experimental approach has been coupled tightly with numerical modelling using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The first part of this thesis is devoted to a study of the hydrodynamics of partially-baffled mixing vessels, including the free-surface deformation caused by the central vortex. The use of an inhomogeneous, multiphase approach allowed simulation of the free-surface deformation. The capability of this novel method was demonstrated by very good agreement between the numerical predictions and experimental data. In the second part, liquid jet injection at the free-surface was coupled with the vessel hydrodynamics. Numerical results, obtained using an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach, have again shown good agreement with experimental data. These results allowed the jet trajectory to be modelled and its penetration into the agitated vessel was quantified. New mixing criteria were introduced that are specific to this application. Finally, the numerical methods validated at the pilot scale were applied at the industrial scale and allowed the proposal of practical improvements to the safety of the synthesis reactors studied