In 2012, plasma figuring was proven to be an alternative solution for the fabrication of large scale ultra-precise optical surfaces. Indeed, plasma figuring was successfully demonstrated on a metre class glass surface. The process was exceptionally rapid but residual errors were observed. This thesis addresses this issue by proposing an enhanced tool that provides a highly collimated plasma jet. The enhanced tool is characterized by a targeted material removal footprint in the range 1 to 5 mm FWHM. The energy beam is provided by an Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) torch equipped with a De-Laval nozzle. This thesis focuses on characterization and optimisation of the bespoke plasma torch and its plasma jet. Two research investigations were carried out using both numerical and experimental approaches. A novel CFD model was created to analyse and understand the behaviour of high temperature gas in the De-Laval nozzle. The numerical approach, that was based on appropriate profiles of temperature and velocity applied to the nozzle inlet, led to a significant reduction of computational resources. This model enabled to investigate the aerodynamic phenomena observed from the nozzle inlet up to the processed surface. Design rules and the effect of changing nozzle parameters were identified. Sensitivity analysis highlighted that the throat diameter is the most critical parameter. A challenging power dissipation analysis of the plasma torch was carried out. Temperature and flow rate in key components of the torch were measured. Experimental results enabled to calculate the power dissipation values for RF power up to 800 W and for the entire series of designed nozzles. This work enabled to scientifically understand the power dissipation mechanism in the bespoke ICP torches. In addition, by comparing the intensity of the power dissipation values, one nozzle was clearly identified as being more capable to provide a highly efficient plasma jet.

In recent years, jet noise has been an active area of research due to an increase in the use of aircraft in both commercial and military applications. To meet the noise standards laid out by government agencies, novel nozzle design concepts are being developed with an aim to attenuate the noise levels. To reduce the high costs incurred by experiments, simulation techniques such as large eddy simulation (LES) in combination with a surface integral acoustic method have received much attention for investigating various nozzle concepts. LES is utilized to predict the unsteady flow in the nearfield, whereas the surface integral acoustic method is used for the computation of noise in the farfield. However, Reynolds numbers at which nozzles operate in the real world are very high making wall-resolved LES simulations prohibitively expensive. To make LES simulations affordable, wall-models are being used to model the flow in the near wall region. Using a highly scalable, sixth-order finite-difference-based, in-house LES code, both wall-resolved and wall-modeled simulations of jets through the baseline short metal chevron (SMC000) nozzle were carried out earlier using an implicit LES (ILES) approach. However, differences exist in noise levels between the two simulations. Understanding the cause and reducing the differences between the two methodologies, while at the same time improving the fidelity of the wall-modeled LES is the main aim of the present work. Three new wall-models are implemented in the in-house LES code. A generalized equilibrium wall-model (GEWM) is implemented along with two wall-models that can account for non-equilibrium effects. First, a series of preliminary SMC000 wall-modeled LES simulations were performed and analyzed using the GEWM. The effect of turbulent length scales and velocity fluctuations specified at the inflow, wall-model formulation, and wall-normal grid refinement are analyzed. The adjustment of the fluctuations levels at the inflow proves to be useful in producing flowfields similar to that of the wall-resolved simulation. The newly implemented wall-models are validated for non-canonical problems such as an accelerating boundary layer developing over a flat plate and flow through a converging-diverging channel. It is noticed that the Reynolds number should be high enough for the non-equilibrium wall-models to be effective. At low Reynolds numbers, both equilibrium and non-equilibrium models produce similar wall shear-stresses. However, the wall shear stress boundary conditions supplied by the wall-models do not affect the mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy, and Reynolds shear stress. Since all the wall-models produce similar results, and the GEWM is the most economical among the implemented wall-models, it is used in performing two wall-modeled LES SMC000 nozzle simulations for noise predictions. The inflow velocity and density fluctuations are varied between the simulations. The first SMC000 simulation uses similar inflow conditions as the previous wall-resolved SMC000 simulation. The second wall-modeled simulation was carried out by reducing the density and velocity fluctuations added to the mean flow at the inlet by 65%. The flowfield and acoustics agree reasonably well in comparison with the wall-resolved LES and similar experiments. Lowering of the velocity and density fluctuations in the wall-model LES improves the agreement of the far-field noise predictions with the wall-resolved LES at most observer locations. However, the preliminary SMC000 simulations performed using a higher Reynolds number and Mach number than that of the previous case show that the approach of adjusting the velocity and density fluctuations added to the mean flow have minimal impact on the developing flowfield which in turn affects the farfield noise. Thus, unless a more effective wall-modeling method is developed, possibly employing an explicit SGS model, the postdictive process of using a wall-model while adjusting the velocity and density fluctuations, seems to be an affordable tool for testing various nozzle designs, subject to the Reynolds number and Mach number being used.

Resumo: As pontas de pulverização são componentes importantes dos sistemas utilizados para a aplicação de defensivos agrícolas por permitirem a alteração das características da aplicação. Às pontas de pulverização com indução de ar, desenvolvidas recentemente, é atribuída a possibilidade de redução da deriva, o que tem contribuído para sua popularização. O objetivo do trabalho foi desenvolver e avaliar métodos para determinar a quantidade de ar incluído às gotas do líquido aspergido por diferentes pontas de pulverização. O spray de gotas com ar em seu interior foi capturado em um funil para determinar a porcentagem de ar nelas contido. Para medir as forças de impacto das gotas foi utilizada uma placa de impacto. Um coletor com as mesmas dimensões de coleta que a placa foi posicionado na mesma posição e orientação do spray, para medir o fluxo de líquido. Em seguida foi calculada a velocidade das gotas. Quatro modelos de pontas de pulverização de jato plano com indução de ar e um modelo convencional foram utilizados. Em cada modelo utilizou-se uma série de pontas com vazões 015, 02, 03 e 04, todas com ângulo de aspersão do jato de 110o. Foram utilizadas, ainda, outras cinco diferentes pontas com indução de ar 02 e 04, de dois modelos, para avaliações de homogeneidade dos resultados entre pontas de mesmo modelo e vazão. Para realizar os testes foi utilizada a solução obtida da mistura de água com 0,1% de um adjuvante não iônico (Agral). Essa solução foi submetida às pressões de trabalho 200, 250, 300, 350 e 400 kPa em todas as pontas de pulverização testadas. Os métodos estudados foram desenvolvidos e avaliados e metodologias de trabalho foram propostas...(Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Agricultural nozzles are important components of the systems used to apply agrochemicals because they allow alterations in terms of the characteristics of an application. To the recently developed air induction nozzles it is attributed the possibility of drift reduction, which contributes to make them more popular. The aim of this study was to develop and to evaluate methods for assessing the amount of air included in the droplets spread by different agricultural nozzles. The spray droplets with air in their interior were captured in a funnel in order to determine the percentage of air in them. An impact plate to measure the droplets impact forces was used. In order to measure the liquid flow a collector with the same area of the impact plate was placed on the same position and orientation of the spray. After data collection the droplets velocity was calculated. Four designs of air induction nozzles and one design of flat fan nozzle were used. In each design a series of nozzles with output of 015, 02, 03 and 04, all with 110o spray angle was used. It was used other five different air induction nozzles 02 and 04 with two different designs to evaluate the homogeneity of results between nozzles with the same design and output. To do the tests it was used the solution obtained from the mixture of tap water with 0,1% of a non-ionic adjuvant (Agral). That solution was submitted to 200, 250, 300, 350, and 400 kPa work pressures in all nozzles tested. The studied methods were developed and tested and working methodologies were proposed. The method of capturing the spray droplets and the determination of the percentage of air included quantified accurately the air induced and established the differences among the nozzles according to the quantity of air induced. That method can be used when setting up norms in order to classify the air induction nozzles...(Complete abstract, click electronic access below) / Orientador: Ulisses Rocha Antuniassi / Coorientador: Paul Charles Harvey Miller / Doutor

Most fighters use the convergent-divergent nozzle configuration to accelerate into the supersonic realm. This nozzle configuration greatly increases the thrust potential of the aircraft compared to the simpler convergent nozzle. The nozzle design is not only crucial for thrust, but also for the drag since the afterbody drag can be as high as 15% of the total. Engine manufacturers optimize the engine and the nozzle configurations for the uninstalled conditions, but these may not be optimal when the engine is installed in the aircraft. The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology to optimize axisymmetric nozzle settings in order to maximize the net thrust. This was accomplished by combining both simulations of thrust and drag. The thrust model was created in an engine performance tool, called EVA, with the installed engine performance of a low bypass turbofan jet engine at maximum afterburner power setting. The drag model was created with CFD, where the mesh was built in ICEM Mesh and the simulations were run with the CFD solver M-Edge. Five Mach numbers in the range from 0.6 to 1.6 were simulated at an altitude of 12 km. The results showed that the afterbody drag generally decreased when increasing jet pressure ratio at both subsonic and supersonic velocities. At subsonic conditions, increasing nozzle area ratio for underexpanded nozzles would decrease the drag. Increasing nozzle area ratio for fully expanded or overexpanded nozzles would instead increase the drag to an intermediate point from where it would decrease. At supersonic condition, increasing nozzle area ratio would generally cause reduction in drag for all cases. The optimization showed that a net thrust increase of 0.02% to 0.09% could be gained for subsonic conditions while the supersonic optimization had negligible gain in thrust.

Automatic altitude compensation has been a holy grail of rocket propulsion for decades. Current state-of-the-art bell nozzles see large performance decreases at low altitudes, limiting rocket designs, shrinking payloads, and overall increasing costs. Aerospike nozzles are an old idea from the 1960’s that provide superior altitude-compensating performance and enhanced performance in vacuum, but have survivability issues that have stopped their application in satellite propulsion systems. A growing need for CubeSat propulsion systems provides the impetus to study aerospike nozzles in this application. This study built two aerospike nozzles using modern 3D metal printing techniques to test aerospikes at a size small enough to be potentially used on a CubeSat. Results indicated promising in-space performance, but further testing to determine thermal limits is deemed necessary.

In this thesis investigations are carried out on two research topics in context to spray drying. The first research topic is the production of dried particles having uniform characteristics. The second research topic is the development of new applications of the reaction engineering approach which, in recent times, has emerged as an effective tool to formulate drying kinetics models. The reaction engineering approach is also implemented to simulate the drying of monodisperse droplets corresponding to the experimental work in the first research topic. Manufacturing micron- and nano-sized particles having uniform characteristics has recently become a popular research area due to the unique functionalities of these kinds of particles in biomedical, drug delivery, functional foods, nutraceuticals, cosmetics and other valuable applications. Spray drying has been a common and economical route to produce dried particles. A typical characteristic of spray dried products is the existence of a significant variation in particle properties such as size and morphology. One possible idea to restrict this product non-uniformity is to achieve a good control over the droplet’s behaviour and characteristics inside the drying chamber. The current thesis has investigated an innovative spray drying technique, i.e. a single stream drying approach in order to restrict product non-uniformity. In this drying approach, identical sized droplets having vertical trajectories are dried under controlled gas flow conditions. The piezoelectricity-driven monodisperse droplet generator is used as the atomizer to disperse liquid droplets. A prototype single stream dryer was assembled based on the single stream drying approach using various components designed in the laboratory and several parts purchased from the market. Experiments were carried out using aqueous lactose solutions as a model system in order to check the practicability of manufacturing uniform-sized spherical particles. Preliminary results were found to be positive and reported in this thesis. Mathematical models on the drying of monodisperse droplets were developed in order to predict important droplet and gas parameter profiles during single stream drying. These models serve as a platform for design, optimization and scale-up purposes. Several important advantages and drawbacks of single stream drying are also reported. Problems encountered during the experimental work and future recommendations are presented in detail so that a more robust and effective drying research tool can be developed in future. Recently the reaction engineering approach (REA) has emerged as a simple and reliable technique to characterize the drying of various food and dairy materials. In this thesis two new applications of the REA are described for the first time in context to convective drying of aqueous droplets. The REA is used in this study to formulate the drying kinetics model for the drying of aqueous sucrose and maltodextrin (DE6) droplets. The effect of initial moisture content was explicitly demonstrated. The development of a new ‘composite’ REA which aimed to model the drying of aqueous droplets containing multiple solutes has been described. The composite REA was found to be suitable to characterize the drying behaviour of aqueous sucrose-maltodextrin mixtures of different proportions. The second new application of the REA is the development of a procedure to estimate surface properties of aqueous droplets during drying. In literature various droplet characteristics such as surface moisture contents were normally estimated using the diffusion-based drying kinetics model or the receding interface model. Surface moisture content and surface glass transition temperature profiles were evaluated here using a lumped-parameter model (REA) during the drying of aqueous sucrose, maltodextrin (DE6) and their mixtures. The same experimental data used for the development of the composite REA were used to yield predictions. The procedure was found to be useful in estimating surface moisture contents and understanding the stickiness behaviour of sugar droplets during drying. During the formulation of the REA-based drying kinetics model in this thesis, the assumption of uniform temperature within droplets was used. In most studies published in literature the uniform temperature assumption was justified by calculating the heat-transfer Biot numbers at the beginning and end of drying. However, the conventional Biot number concept does not take into account the evaporation effect and therefore would not be suitable to drying scenarios. In this thesis, a new approximation procedure is developed to estimate surface-centre temperature differences within materials following the entire drying process. This new procedure was helpful to check the extent of temperature non-uniformity within skim milk droplets under isothermal laboratory conditions as well as industrial spray drying conditions. Both conventional and drying-based Biot numbers are calculated and compared. Predictions showed that temperature gradients within the droplets were negligible during the drying of suspended droplets under laboratory drying conditions (slow drying), whilst the gradients were small and existed only for a short drying period for small droplets under industrial spray drying conditions (fast drying). Furthermore, it was observed that the maximum temperature gradient within the droplets did not exist at the starting or end points of the drying process, and therefore the estimation of Biot numbers at the starting and end point does not reflect temperature non-uniformity under drying conditions. This is a significant theoretical development in the area.

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A prerequisite for aeroelastic stability prediction inturbomachines is the understanding of the fluctuatingaerodynamic forces acting on the blades. Unsteady transonicflows are complex because of mutual interactions betweentravelling pressure waves, outlet disturbances, shock motion,and fluctuating turbulent boundary layers. Complex phenomenaappear in the shock/boundary layer region and produce phaselags and high time harmonics, which can give a significantcontribution to the overall unsteady lift and torque, andtherefore affect flutter boundaries, cause large localstresses, or even severely damage the turbomachine. The present research work is concerned with theunderstanding of phenomena associated with travelling waves innon-uniform transonic flows and how they affect the unsteadypressure distribution on the surface as well as the far fieldradiated sound. In similitude with turbomachines potentialinteraction, the emphasis was put on the unsteady interactionof upstream propagating acoustic waves with an oscillatingshock in 2D and 3D nozzle flows. Both numerical andexperimental studies are carried out and compared with eachother. Results shows that the unsteady pressure distribution, bothon the bump surface and within the channel, results from thesuperposition of upstream and downstream propagating waves. Itis believed that outlet pressure perturbations propagateupstream in the nozzle, interact in the high subsonic flowregion according to the acoustic blockage theory, and arepartly reflected or absorbed by the oscillating shock,depending on the frequency of the perturbations and theintensity of the SBLI. Furthermore the shock motion amplitudeis found to be related to the mean flow gradients and localwave length of the perturbations rather than to the shockboundary layer interaction. The phase angle between incomingpressure perturbations and the shock motion increases with theperturbation frequency but also depends on the intensity of theSBLI. Additionally the phase angle "shift" observed underneaththe shock location linearly increases with the perturbationfrequency and the shock strength. Such phase shift is criticalregarding aeroelastic stability and might have a significantimpact on the phase angle of the overall aerodynamic forceacting on the blade and shift the aerodynamic damping fromstable to exciting. <b>Keywords:</b>Shock Boundary Layer Interaction, ShockMotion, Unsteady Flows, Nozzle Flows, Potential Interaction,Back Pressure Perturbations.

Plasma flow physics in magnetic nozzles must be clearly understood for optimal design of plasma propulsion devices. Toward that end, in this thesis we: i) perform an extensive literature survey of magnetic nozzle physics, ii) assess the validity of magnetohydrodynamics for studying magnetic nozzle physics, and iii) illustrate the effects of the Hall term in simple flows as well as in magnetic nozzle configurations through numerical experiments with the Magneto-Gas Kinetic Method (MGKM). The crucial steps necessary for thrust generation in magnetic nozzles are energy conversion, plasma detachment, and momentum transfer. These three physical phenomena must be understood to optimize magnetic nozzle design. The operating dimensionless parameter ranges of six prominent experiments are considered and the corresponding mechanisms are discussed. An order of magnitude analysis of the governing equations reveal: i) most magnetic nozzles under consideration operate at the edge of the continuum regime rendering continuum-based description and computation valid; ii) in the context of MHD framework, the generalized Ohm’s law must be used to capture all of the relevant physics. This work also continues the development of the Magneto Gas Kinetic Method (MGKM) computational tool. Validation of the solver is performed in shock-tube and Hartmann channel flows in the Hall physics regime. Comparison with theory and available data is made whenever possible. Novel numerical experiments of magnetic nozzle plasma jets in the Hall regime are performed, confirming the theoretically predicted azimuthal rotation of the plasma jet due to Hall physics. The primary conclusion from this work is that the addition of the Hall effect generates helical structures in magnetic nozzle plasma flows. Preliminary results are encouraging for future magnetic nozzle studies and further challenges are identified.

No description available.