Experimental Studies of Premixed Flame Structure and Propagation Characteristics in Compressible Flow

Abstract

Understanding the nature of premixed combustion in highly turbulent conditions and in compressible flow offers a new paradigm shift in the design of future high-pressure gas turbines and scramjets. Experimental data in these regimes provides hitherto unavailable insight and offer new ways to develop accurate and efficient computational models of turbulent premixed combustion, especially subgrid-scale (SGS) models for large-eddy simulation (LES). In these studies, comprehensive experimental efforts were performed to study turbulent premixed combustion in a configuration that deliberately avoided mean strain effects and focused solely on the integration of premixed flame in high Reynolds number, isotropic turbulence over a range of Mach numbers. Two experiments were developed to create this uniform premixed flow with upstream active turbulence generation in the subsonic and supersonic regimes. Turbulent statistics are reported for a variety of conditions using hotwire anemometry and PIV. Flame kernels were generated via laser plasma ignition, and their growth monitored using chemiluminescence, Schlieren, and PLIF imaging. Flame growth statistics show good agreement with classical flame bomb studies in low speeds but deviate with increasing Mach number.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 14, 2015
Accession Number
AD1013303

Entities

People

  • Brad Ochs
  • Dan Fries
  • David Scarborough
  • Jeff Jagoda
  • Nathan R. Grady
  • Robert Pitz
  • Suresh Menon
  • Tom Slais

Organizations

  • Georgia Tech

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Boundary Layer
  • Burning Rate
  • Combustion
  • Combustion Products
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Heat Transfer
  • Information Science
  • Large Eddy Simulation
  • Laser Induced Fluorescence
  • Lasers
  • Mechanics
  • Optics
  • Pressure Measurement
  • Silica Glass
  • Turbulent Mixing

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Combustion science or combustion engineering.
  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy
  • Hypersonics
  • Hypersonics - Hypersonic Flow