State of the art aircraft afterburners employ spray bars to inject fuel and flameholders to stabilize the combustion process. Such afterburner designs significantly increase the length (and thus weight), pressure losses, and observability of the engine. This thesis presents a feasibility study of a compact prime and trigger (PAT) afterburner concept that eliminates the fuel spray bars and flameholders and, thus, eliminates the above-mentioned problems. In this concept, afterburner fuel is injected just upstream or in between the turbine stages. Downstream of the turbine stages, a low power pilot, or trigger , can be used to control the combustion process. The envisioned trigger for the PAT concept is a jet of product gas from ultra-rich hydrocarbon/air combustion that is injected through the afterburner liner. This partial oxidation (POx) gas, which consists mostly of H2, CO, and diluents, rapidly produces radicals and heat that accelerate the autoignition of the primed mixture and, thus, provide an anchor point for the afterburner combustion process. The objective of this research was to demonstrate the feasibility of the PAT concept by showing that (1) combustion of fuel injected within or upstream of turbine stages can occur only downstream of the turbine stages, and (2) the combustion zone is compact, stable and efficient. This was accomplished using two experimental facilities, a developed theoretical model, and Chemkin simulations. The first facility, termed the Afterburner Facility (AF), simulated the bulk flow temperature, velocity and O2 content through a turbojet combustor, turbine stage and afterburner. The second facility, termed the Propane Autoignition Combustor (PAC), was essentially a scaled-down, simplified version of the AF. The developed model was used to predict and interpret the AF results and to study the feasibility of the PAT concept at pressures outside the AF operating range. Finally, the Chemkin simulations were used to study the effect of several POx gas compositions on the afterburner combustion process.

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.

A two-year experimental campaign is described during which diamond-like carbon and plastic targets with thicknesses from 20 nanometers to 15 micrometers were irradiated by the Texas Petawatt Laser. Target composition and thickness were varied to modify the specifics of the laser-matter interaction. Plasma mirrors were selectively implemented to affect the contrast of the laser system and provide additional control of the physical processes under investigation. A number of particle diagnostics were implemented to measure the distribution of laser accelerated ions and electrons. In addition, optical diagnostics were fielded to measure the intensity profile of the laser and measure the density of the target pre-plasma. The results of these experiments suggest that the Texas Petawatt laser pulse has pre-pulse and pedestal features with intensities at least 10⁻⁸ of the main pulse. Micronscale targets were able to survive these features and maintain a relatively sharp density gradient until the arrival of the main laser pulse, allowing for ion acceleration. Electron spectra measured in this configuration show an average temperature of 10 MeV, with no v angular dependence out to at least 60 degrees. By contrast, interferometric plasma density measurements and a lack of any observable ion acceleration suggest that nanoscale targets were destroyed well before the main pulse. In this case, the peak of the laser pulse interacted with a cloud of plasma between 10⁻³ and 10⁻² of critical density. The contrast improvement offered by the implementation of plasma mirrors was seen to increase the maximum energy of laser accelerated protons from targets thicker than 1 micrometer. In addition, the plasma mirrors allowed nanoscale targets to survive pre-pulse and pedestal features and support the production of ion beams. Proton spectra show that ions were accelerated to greater maximum energies from nanoscale targets than from more traditional micron-scale targets. This effect can be attributed to a reduction in the target pre-plasma scale length upon the introduction of plasma mirrors. These results indicate that the manipulation of target properties and laser contrast can significantly affect the interaction between an ultrahigh intensity laser and a target. / text