The objective of this master thesis was to investigate an ablative liner for the T-Minus DART booster that will accelerate a dart to Mach 5.2 within five seconds. An oxyacetylene torch test was used to sort out the obviously bad materials. Glass fiber/epoxy, with and without alumina as fire retardant, and carbon fiber/epoxy were selected for further investigation. A sub-scale motor was built to expose the materials for conditions similar to the booster conditions in regard to temperature, chemistry, flow velocity and pressure. The target pressure could not be reached in the sub-scale motor but a polynomial function was fitted to the data in order to extrapolate the data and estimate the ablation rate at 7 MPa. The final design is always based on measurements on full scale motors. This could not be done within this report. Recommendation for future work is to use an insulator of 1.8 mm of carbon fiber/epoxy or 1.3 mm of glass fiber/epoxy/alumina for the sub-scale firings to come.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 甲第18435号 / 地環博第117号 / 新制||地環||23(附属図書館) / 31293 / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎地球環境学専攻 / (主査)教授 勝見 武, 教授 高岡 昌輝, 准教授 乾 徹 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

Cylinder liners in heavy-duty truck engines are subjected to intense vibrations and may sustain damage from the cavitation of bubbles in the coolant liquid, with some risks of leakage and engine breakdown. An ultrasonic oscillating probe was used to simulate the pitting rates and behavior of samples extracted from cylinder liners, which are made of grey cast iron, with differences in surface roughness, glycol and inhibitor content in coolant, coolant temperature and graphite flake class; bainitic microstructures were also tested. Measurements consisted of mass losses under set intervals during experiments lasting 2.5 or 4 hours. Affected surfaces were later evaluated with scanning electron microscopy and confocal microscopy. Results indicate higher cavitation damage with: lower concentrations of glycol and absence of corrosion/cavitation inhibitors in the coolant liquid, lower liquid temperatures between 76⁰C and 90⁰C, and presence of B-type graphite class in the microstructure. Results regarding surface roughness were inconclusive. A sequence of surface damage mechanisms has been proposed, with corresponding microscope observations, to explain the mass loss trends and the associated microstructural changes over time.

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Combustion designers have considered back-side impingement cooling as the solution for modern DLE combustors. The idea is to provide more cooling to the deserved local hot spots and reserve unnecessary coolant air from local cold spots. Therefore, if accurate heat load distribution on the liners can be obtained, then an intelligent cooling system can be designed to focus more on the localized hot spots. The goal of this study is to determine the heat transfer and pressure distribution inside a typical can-annular gas turbine combustor. This is one of the first efforts in the public domain to investigate the convective heat load to combustor liner due to swirling flow generated by swirler nozzles. An experimental combustor test model was designed and fitted with a swirler nozzle provided by Solar Turbines Inc. Heat transfer and pressure distribution measurements were carried out along the combustor wall to determine the thermo-fluid dynamic effects inside a combustor. The temperature and heat transfer profile along the length of the combustor liner were determined and a heat transfer peak region was established. Constant-heat-flux boundary condition was established using two identical surface heaters, and the Infrared Thermal Imaging system was used to capture the real-time steady-state temperature distribution at the combustor liner wall. Analysis on the flow characteristics was also performed to compare the pressure distributions with the heat transfer results. The experiment was conducted at two different Reynolds numbers (Re 50,000 and Re 80,000), to investigate the effect of Reynolds Number on the heat transfer peak locations and pressure distributions. The results reveal that the heat transfer peak regions at both the Reynolds numbers occur at approximately the same location. The results from this study on a broader scale will help in understanding and predicting swirling flow effects on the local convective heat load to the combustor liner, thereby enabling the combustion engineer to design more effective cooling systems to improve combustor durability and performance. / Master of Science

While the gas turbine research community is continuously pursuing development of higher cyclic efficiency designs by increasing the combustor firing temperatures and thermally resistant turbine vane / blade materials, a simultaneous effort to reduce the emission levels of high temperature driven thermal NOX also needs to be addressed. Lean premixed combustion has been found as one of the solutions to these objectives. However, since less amount of air is available for backside cooling of liner walls, it becomes very important to characterize the convective heat transfer that occurs on the inside wall of the combustor liners. These studies were explored using laboratory scale experiments as well as numerical approaches for several inlet flow conditions under both non-reacting and reacting flows. These studies may be expected to provide valuable insights for the industrial design communities towards identifying thermal hot spot locations as well as in quantifying the heat transfer magnitude, thus aiding in effective designs of the liner walls. Lean premixed gas turbine combustor flows involve strongly coupled interactions between several aspects of physics such as the degree of swirl imparted by the inlet fuel nozzle, premixing of the fuel and incoming air, lean premixed combustion within the combustor domain, the interaction of swirling flow with combustion driven heat release resulting in flow dilation, the resulting pressure fluctuations leading to thermo-acoustic instabilities there by creating a feedback loop with incoming reactants resulting in flow instabilities leading to flame lift off, flame extinction etc. Hence understanding combustion driven swirling flow in combustors continues to be a topic of intense research. In the present study, numerical predictions of swirl driven combustor flows were analyzed for a specific swirl number of an industrial fuel nozzle (swirler) using a commercial computational fluid dynamics tool and compared against in-house experimental data. The latter data was obtained from a newly developed test rig at Applied Propulsion and Power Laboratory (APPL) at Virginia Tech. The simulations were performed and investigated for several flow Reynolds numbers under non-reacting condition using various two equation turbulence models as well as a scale resolving model. The work was also extended to reacting flow modeling (using a partially premixed model) for a specific Reynolds number. These efforts were carried out in order investigate the flow behavior and also characterize convective heat transfer along the combustor wall (liner). Additionally, several parametric studies were performed towards investigating the effect of combustor geometry on swirling flow and liner hear transfer; and also to investigate the effect of inlet swirl on the jet impingement location along the liner wall under both non-reacting as well as reacting conditions. The numerical results show detailed comparison against experiments for swirling flow profiles within the combustor under reacting conditions indicating a good reliability of steady state modeling approaches for reacting conditions; however, the limitations of steady state RANS turbulence models were observed for non-reacting swirling flow conditions, where the flow profiles deviate from experimental observations in the central recirculation region. Also, the numerical comparison of liner wall heat transfer characteristics against experiments showed a sensitivity to Reynolds numbers. These studies offer to provide preliminary insights of RANS predictions based on commercial CFD tools in predicting swirling, non-reacting and reacting flow and heat transfer. They can be extended to reacting flow heat transfer studies in future and also may be upgraded to unsteady LES predictions to complement future experimental observations conducted at the in-house test facility. / Ph. D.

A comparison study between axial and radial swirler performance in a gas turbine can combustor was conducted by investigating the correlation between combustor flow field geometry and convective heat transfer at cold flow conditions for Reynolds numbers of 50,000 and 80,000. Flow velocities were measured using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) along the center axial plane and radial cross sections of the flow. It was observed that both swirlers produced a strong rotating flow with a reverse flow core. The axial swirler induced larger recirculation zones at both the backside wall and the central area as the flow exits the swirler, and created a much more uniform rotational velocity distribution. The radial swirler however, produced greater rotational velocity as well as a thicker and higher velocity reverse flow core. Wall heat transfer and temperature measurements were also taken. Peak heat transfer regions directly correspond to the location of the flow as it exits each swirler and impinges on the combustor liner wall. Convective heat transfer was also measured along the liner wall of a gas turbine annular combustor fitted with radial swirlers for Reynolds numbers 210000, 420000, and 840000. The impingement location of the flow exiting from the radial swirler resulted in peak heat transfer regions along the concave wall of the annular combustor. The convex side showed peak heat transfer regions above and below the impingement area. This behavior is due to the recirculation zones caused by the interaction between the swirlers inside the annulus. / Master of Science

Yes / Speed optimization of liner vessels has significant economic and environmental impact for reducing fuel cost and Green House Gas (GHG) emission as the shipping over maritime logistics takes more than 70% of world transportation. While slow steaming is widely used as best practices for liner shipping companies, they are also under the pressure to maintain service level agreement (SLA) with their cargo clients. Thus, deciding optimal speed that minimizes fuel consumption while maintaining SLA is managerial decision problem. Studies in the literature use theoretical fuel consumption functions in their speed optimization models but these functions have limitations due to weather conditions in voyages. This paper uses weather archive data to estimate the real fuel consumption function for speed optimization problems. In particular, Copernicus data set is used as the source of big data and data mining technique is applied to identify the impact of weather conditions based on a given voyage route. Particle swarm optimization, a metaheuristic optimization method, is applied to find Pareto optimal solutions that minimize fuel consumption and maximize SLA. The usefulness of the proposed approach is verified through the real data obtained from a liner company and real world implications are discussed.

Ghana, a West Africa country, is deeply burdened by poverty, and relies on the production of gold for economic sustainability. The gold mining companies in the country have international origins and receive most of their requirements from international sources. The extraction of gold from the crushed ore requires sodium cyanide as a lixiviant, which is imported into Ghana from other countries in wooden intermediate bulk containers (IBC) for further distribution to the mines. A life cycle assessment was completed to determine the burden that this packaging, which includes the wooden container and polyethylene and polypropylene liners, places on the environment in Ghana when disposed of. It was found that the life cycle of the incinerated IBC impacted on the Ghanaian environment the most, due to the incineration and the transportation of the IBC. The International Organization for Standardization 14040 management standard was used as a methodological framework for the assessment. / Environmental Science / M.Sc. (Environmental Science)