The highly competitive gas turbine industry has been motivated by consumer demands for higher power-to-weight ratios, increased thermal efficiencies, and reliability while maintaining affordability. In its continual quest, the industry must continually try to raise the turbine inlet temperature, which according to the well-known Brayton cycle is key to higher engine efficiencies. The desire for increased turbine inlet temperatures creates an extremely harsh environment for the combustor liner in addition to the components downstream of the combustor. Shear layers between the dilution jets and the mainstream, as well as combustor liner film-cooling interactions create a complex mean flow field within the combustor, which is not easy to model. A completely uniform temperature and velocity profile at the combustor exit is desirable from the standpoint of reducing the secondary flows in the turbine. However, this seldom occurs due to a lack of thorough mixing within the combustor. Poor mixing results in non-uniformities, such as hot streaks, and allow non-combusted fuel to exit the combustor. This investigation developed a database documenting the thermal and flow characteristics within a combustor simulator representative of the flowfield within a gas turbine aero-engine. Three- and two-component laser Doppler velocimeter measurements were completed to quantify the flow and turbulence fields, while a thermocouple rake was used to quantify the thermal fields. The measured results show very high turbulence levels due to the dilution flow injection. Directly downstream of the dilution jets, an increased thickness in the film-cooling was noted with a fairly non-homogeneous temperature field across the combustor width. A highly turbulent shear layer was found at the leading edge of the dilution jets. Measurements also showed that a relatively extensive recirculation region existed downstream of the dilution jets. Despite the lack of film-cooling injection at the trailing edge of the dilution hole, there existed coolant flow indicative of a horse-shoe vortex wrapping around the jet. As a result of the dilution jet interaction with the mainstream flow, kidney-shaped thermal fields and counter-rotating vortices developed. These vortices serve to enhance combustor mixing. / Master of Science

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When an aircraft is aerodynamically or structurally damaged in battle, it may not able to complete the mission and the damage may cause its loss. The subject of aircraft battle survivability is one of critical concern to many disciplines, whether military or civil. This thesis considered and focused on Computational Fluid Dynamics [CFD] predictions and experimental investigations into the effects of simulated battle damage on the low-speed aerodynamics of a fmite aspect ratio wing. Results showed that in two-dimensional [2d] and three-dimensional [3D] CFD simulations, Fluent's® models work reasonably well in predicting jets flow structures, pressure distributions, and pressure-coefficient Cp's contours but not for aerodynamic coefficients. The consequences were therefore that CFD prediction was poor on aerodynamic-coefficients increments. The prediction of Cp's achieved good agreement upstream and near the damage hole, but showed poor agreement at downstream of the hole. For the flow structure visualisation, at both weak and strong jet incidences, the solver always predicted pressure-distribution-coefficient lower at upstream and higher at downstream. The results showed relatively good agreement for the case of transitional and strong jet incidences but slightly poor for weak jet incidences. From the experimental results of Finite Wing, the increments for Aspect-ratio, AR6, AR8 and ARIO showed that as damage moves out towards the tip, aerodynamic-coefficients increments i.e. lift-loss and drag-rise decreased, and pitching-moment-coefficient increment indicated a more positive value at all incidence ranges and at all aspect ratios. Increasing the incidence resulted in greater magnitudes of lift-loss and drag-rise for all damage locations and aspect ratios. At the weak jet incidence 4° for AR8 and in all of the three damage locations, the main characteristics of the weak-jet were illustrated clearly. The increments were relatively small. Whilst at 8°, the flow structure was characterised as transitional to stronger-jet. In Finite Wing tests and for all damage locations, there was always a flow structure asymmetry. This was believed to be due to gravity, surface imperfection, and or genuine feature. An 'early strong jet' that indicated in Finite Wing-AR8 at 'transitional' incidence of 8°, also indicated in twodimensional results but at the weak-jet incidence of 4°. For the application of 2d data to AR6, AR8, and ARIO, an assessment of 2d force results led to the analysis that the tests in the AAE's Low Turbulence Tunnel for 2d were under-predicting the damage effects at low incidence, and over-predicting at high incidences. This suggested therefore that Irwin's 2d results could not be used immediately to predict three-dimensional.