Computational and Experimental Study of the Structure of Diffusion Flames of Jet Fuel and Its Surrogates at Pressures up to 40 ATM
Abstract
Despite considerable progress made in computational fluid mechanics, chemical kinetics and soot processes in recent years, the study of complex fuels in gas turbine engines, including soot processes is still a daunting task and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Traditionally, the combustion community has chosen either to focus on the fluid mechanics of real engines with simplified chemical kinetics or to study simple laminar flames with detailed kinetics and transport. This dichotomy is a necessity as the level of computer power needed to solve the complete engine/chemistry problem will not be available for years to come. The challenge is even greater, to the point of being unrealistic, if complex fuels and soot are to be included. Our research program has the realistic objective of examining the structure of gaseous laminar diffusion flames perturbed by the addition of a few thousand ppm of complex fuels such as: higher alkanes and aromatics, their combination in jet fuel surrogates and, ultimately jet fuel itself. The aim is to study their flame structure and soot behavior in the entire pressure range of relevance to modern gas turbines, that is, 1-40 atm. A counterflow diffusion flame is selected as an optimal environment for the research due to the suppression of buoyancy instabilities that typically plague coflow flames at high pressures, the unparalleled level of control that it provides on the soot formation process, and the opportunity of modeling the system as one-dimensional, which is advantageous for fuels with a very large chemical mechanism, such as JP-8.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 21, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA581881
Entities
People
- Alessandro Gomez
- Mitchell D. Smooke
Organizations
- Yale University