High-g field combustion, such as in rotary ramjet engines, is a promising approach to reduce nitride oxides and combustor size by taking advantage of the flame acceleration due to the buoyancy of the products over the reactants. This paper presents a high-g field combustor design for a rim-rotor rotary ramjet engine. In this device, a premixed flow of air and fuel is ignited in the nonrotating inlet track and then swallowed and stabilized in the rotating combustion chamber. Outboard ignition frees the rotating structure from igniters, increasing the maximal tangential speed of the engine and thus its maximal efficiency. The rotating combustor design benefits from extreme centrifugal fields (105 g to 107 g) for both stabilizing the flame during ignition and maximize flame velocity. A simple buoyancy-driven combustion model allows estimating the combustor length and shows good agreement with numerical simulations, which demonstrate a combustion efficiency to be higher than 85%, even with some reactants bypassing the flameholder. Experiments demonstrate ignition at tangential speeds from 250 to 380 m/s, combustion efficiency from 60 to 75% up to a centrifugal acceleration of 7×105 g, and positive indicated power.
High-g field combustor of a rim-rotor rotary ramjet engine
Rotierende Verbrennungskammer mit hohem g-Feld für ein Rim-Rotor-Staustrahltriebwerk
AIAA Journal ; 52 , 5 ; 1024-1034
2014
11 Seiten, Bilder, Tabellen, 26 Quellen
Article (Journal)
English
High-g Field Combustor of a Rim-Rotor Rotary Ramjet Engine
Online Contents | 2014
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