MULTIPHASE FLOW MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF PHASED FILLING PROCESS FOR PULSED DETONATION ENGINE
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Date
2018-01-04Author
Umapathy, Nirmal Kumar
0000-0002-0207-9029
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Filling of reactants into a pulsed detonation engine (PDE) should be carried out quickly because any lengthening of the fill time will lead to an increased cycle time. The fill process and, the purge process constitutes a large proportion of time in a cycle. The purpose of this research was to improve the time of fill by implementing various injection geometries in two injection schemes with five different premixed stoichiometric fuel-air mixture injected at wide range of velocity. The different configurations examined were end wall injection, side wall injection with ports angled and normal to the flow direction and staggered side wall injection. The two injection schemes were simultaneous injection and phased injection through side wall ports. The fuel choices were biogas, hydrogen, methane, propane and octane, all in the gaseous state. The oxidizer considered was air and pre-mixed with fuels. Numerical modeling was carried out using the commercial software Fluent as the mesh generation tool and flow solver, solving the Reynolds--averaged Navier--Stokes equations with a k-E turbulence model. The normal sidewall injection yielded the shortest fill time while staggered injection resulted in good fill uniformity. Angled upstream injection resulted in the most advantage with low time of fill, good fill uniformity and moderate spillage. Future improvements were suggested.