ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0002-0207-9029

Graduation Semester and Year

2017

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

First Advisor

Frank Lu

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Purging, PDE, Pulse detonation engine, Fuel filling, Multiphase flow, CFD

Disciplines

Aerospace Engineering | Engineering | Mechanical Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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