In the TechCLEAN project of JAXA, a combustor for a small aircraft engine has been developed. The combustor was tuned to show the behavior of the Rich-Lean combustion through combustion tests under atmospheric and practical conditions. In the development process of the combustor, numerical simulation methods were also utilized as analysis tools to accelerate the development of the combustor. To use in the screening process of the combustor design, we focused on cost-effective simulation methods and adopted the cold-flow RANS simulation code UPACS which has been developed in JAXA. And to simplify the treatment of calculation grids of the combustor with complicated configuration, we also utilized combination of the overset grid method with the attached multi-block grid method. This simulation method was applied to three phases in the combustor development process; first to the analysis of the combustor configuration to adjust the overall pressure loss, secondly to the analysis of flame stability, and thirdly to the tuning of air flow ratio to optimize emission characteristics of full annular combustors. Finally, the full annular combustor was successively tuned to reduce NOx emissions to 38.1% of the ICAO CAEP4 standard under ICAO LTO cycles, also sustaining basic performances as an aircraft combustor.
Corrigendum to “A staggered overset grid method for resolved simulation of incompressible flow around moving spheres” [J. Comput. Phys. 333 (2017) 269-296]
