scholarly journals Simulation of a GOx-GCH4 Rocket Combustor and the Effect of the GEKO Turbulence Model Coefficients

Aerospace ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
Evgeny Strokach ◽  
Victor Zhukov ◽  
Igor Borovik ◽  
Andrej Sternin ◽  
Oscar J. Haidn

In this study, a single injector methane-oxygen rocket combustor is numerically studied. The simulations included in this study are based on the hardware and experimental data from the Technical University of Munich. The focus is on the recently developed generalized k–ω turbulence model (GEKO) and the effect of its adjustable coefficients on the pressure and on wall heat flux profiles, which are compared with the experimental data. It was found that the coefficients of ‘jet’, ‘near-wall’, and ‘mixing’ have a major impact, whereas the opposite can be deduced about the ‘separation’ parameter Csep, which highly influences the pressure and wall heat flux distributions due to the changes in the eddy-viscosity field. The simulation results are compared with the standard k–ε model, displaying a qualitatively and quantitatively similar behavior to the GEKO model at a Csep equal to unity. The default GEKO model shows a stable performance for three oxidizer-to-fuel ratios, enhancing the reliability of its use. The simulations are conducted using two chemical kinetic mechanisms: Zhukov and Kong and the more detailed RAMEC. The influence of the combustion model is of the same order as the influence of the turbulence model. In general, the numerical results present a good or satisfactory agreement with the experiment, and both GEKO at Csep = 1 or the standard k–ε model can be recommended for usage in the CFD simulations of rocket combustion chambers, as well as the Zhukov–Kong mechanism in conjunction with the flamelet approach.

2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibendu Som ◽  
Douglas E. Longman ◽  
Zhaoyu Luo ◽  
Max Plomer ◽  
Tianfeng Lu ◽  
...  

Combustion in direct-injection diesel engines occurs in a lifted, turbulent diffusion flame mode. Numerous studies indicate that the combustion and emissions in such engines are strongly influenced by the lifted flame characteristics, which are in turn determined by fuel and air mixing in the upstream region of the lifted flame, and consequently by the liquid breakup and spray development processes. From a numerical standpoint, these spray combustion processes depend heavily on the choice of underlying spray, combustion, and turbulence models. The present numerical study investigates the influence of different chemical kinetic mechanisms for diesel and biodiesel fuels, as well as Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) and large eddy simulation (LES) turbulence models on predicting flame lift-off lengths (LOLs) and ignition delays. Specifically, two chemical kinetic mechanisms for n-heptane (NHPT) and three for biodiesel surrogates are investigated. In addition, the renormalization group (RNG) k-ε (RANS) model is compared to the Smagorinsky based LES turbulence model. Using adaptive grid resolution, minimum grid sizes of 250 μm and 125 μm were obtained for the RANS and LES cases, respectively. Validations of these models were performed against experimental data from Sandia National Laboratories in a constant volume combustion chamber. Ignition delay and flame lift-off validations were performed at different ambient temperature conditions. The LES model predicts lower ignition delays and qualitatively better flame structures compared to the RNG k-ε model. The use of realistic chemistry and a ternary surrogate mixture, which consists of methyl decanoate, methyl nine-decenoate, and NHPT, results in better predicted LOLs and ignition delays. For diesel fuel though, only marginal improvements are observed by using larger size mechanisms. However, these improved predictions come at a significant increase in computational cost.


1976 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Mastanaiah

Experimental data are obtained for surface recession, char depth, and temperatures in silica phenolic and carbon phenolic ablators from static test conducted on rocket nozzles. In an attempt to correlate the theoretical analysis with the experimental observations, it is found that the effective thermal conductivity of char is strongly dependent on the wall heat flux. An hypothesis is postulated that the char conductivity can best be correlated by cold wall heat flux treated as a generalized variable that includes the effects of other factors like temperature and chemical composition of the char. Exponential dependence of char conductivity on the cold wall heat flux is observed for both the ablators, and has offered excellent comparison between the theoretical and the experimental system response.


Author(s):  
Sibendu Som ◽  
Douglas E. Longman ◽  
Zhaoyu Luo ◽  
Max Plomer ◽  
Tianfeng Lu ◽  
...  

Combustion in direct-injection diesel engines occurs in a lifted, turbulent diffusion flame mode. Numerous studies indicate that the combustion and emissions in such engines are strongly influenced by the lifted flame characteristics, which are in turn determined by fuel and air mixing in the upstream region of the lifted flame, and consequently by the liquid breakup and spray development processes. From a numerical standpoint, these spray combustion processes depend heavily on the choice of underlying spray, combustion, and turbulence models. The present numerical study investigates the influence of different chemical kinetic mechanisms for diesel and biodiesel fuels, as well as Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and large eddy simulation (LES) turbulence models on predicting flame lift-off lengths (LOLs) and ignition delays. Specifically, two chemical kinetic mechanisms for n-heptane (NHPT) and three for biodiesel surrogates are investigated. In addition, the RNG k-ε (RANS) model is compared to the Smagorinsky based LES turbulence model. Using adaptive grid resolution, minimum grid sizes of 250 μm and 125 μm were obtained for the RANS and LES cases respectively. Validations of these models were performed against experimental data from Sandia National Laboratories in a constant volume combustion chamber. Ignition delay and flame lift-off validations were performed at different ambient temperature conditions. The LES model predicts lower ignition delays and qualitatively better flame structures compared to the RNG k-ε model. The use of realistic chemistry and a ternary surrogate mixture, which consists of methyl decanoate, methyl 9-decenoate, and NHPT, results in better predicted LOLs and ignition delays. For diesel fuel though, only marginal improvements are observed by using larger size mechanisms. However, these improved predictions come at a significant increase in computational cost.


Author(s):  
Janardhan Kodavasal ◽  
Christopher Kolodziej ◽  
Stephen Ciatti ◽  
Sibendu Som

Gasoline compression ignition (GCI) is a low temperature combustion (LTC) concept that has been gaining increasing interest over the recent years owing to its potential to achieve diesel-like thermal efficiencies with significantly reduced engine-out nitrogen oxides (NOx) and soot emissions compared to diesel engines. In this work, closed-cycle computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed of this combustion mode using a sector mesh in an effort to understand effects of model settings on simulation results. One goal of this work is to provide recommendations for grid resolution, combustion model, chemical kinetic mechanism, and turbulence model to accurately capture experimental combustion characteristics. Grid resolutions ranging from 0.7 mm to 0.1 mm minimum cell sizes were evaluated in conjunction with both Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) based turbulence models. Solution of chemical kinetics using the multi-zone approach is evaluated against the detailed approach of solving chemistry in every cell. The relatively small primary reference fuel (PRF) mechanism (48 species) used in this study is also evaluated against a larger 312-species gasoline mechanism. Based on these studies the following model settings are chosen keeping in mind both accuracy and computation costs — 0.175 mm minimum cell size grid, RANS turbulence model, 48-species PRF mechanism, and multi-zone chemistry solution with bin limits of 5 K in temperature and 0.05 in equivalence ratio. With these settings, the performance of the CFD model is evaluated against experimental results corresponding to a low load start of injection (SOI) timing sweep. The model is then exercised to investigate the effect of SOI on combustion phasing with constant intake valve closing (IVC) conditions and fueling over a range of SOI timings to isolate the impact of SOI on charge preparation and ignition. Simulation results indicate that there is an optimum SOI timing, in this case −30°aTDC (after top dead center), which results in the most stable combustion. Advancing injection with respect to this point leads to significant fuel mass burning in the colder squish region, leading to retarded phasing and ultimately misfire for SOI timings earlier than −42°aTDC. On the other hand, retarding injection beyond this optimum timing results in reduced residence time available for gasoline ignition kinetics, and also leads to retarded phasing, with misfire at SOI timings later than −15°aTDC.


Author(s):  
Ruitao Song ◽  
Gerald Gentz ◽  
Guoming Zhu ◽  
Elisa Toulson ◽  
Harald Schock

Turbulent jet ignition combustion is a promising concept for achieving high thermal efficiency and low NOx (nitrogen oxides) emissions. A control-oriented turbulent jet ignition combustion model with satisfactory accuracy and low computational effort is usually a necessity for optimizing the turbulent jet ignition combustion system and developing the associated model-based turbulent jet ignition control strategies. This article presents a control-oriented turbulent jet ignition combustion model developed for a rapid compression machine configured for turbulent jet ignition combustion. A one-zone gas exchange model is developed to simulate the gas exchange process in both pre- and main-combustion chambers. The combustion process is modeled by a two-zone combustion model, where the ratio of the burned and unburned gases flowing between the two combustion chambers is variable. To simulate the influence of the turbulent jets on the rate of combustion in the main-combustion chamber, a new parameter-varying Wiebe function is proposed and used for the mass fraction burned calculation in the main-combustion chamber. The developed model is calibrated using the least-squares fitting and optimization procedures. Experimental data sets with different air-to-fuel ratios in both combustion chambers and different pre-combustion chamber orifice areas are used to calibrate and validate the model. The simulation results show good agreement with the experimental data for all the experimental data sets. This indicates that the developed combustion model is accurate for developing and validating turbulent jet ignition combustion control strategies. Future work will extend the rapid compression machine combustion model to engine applications.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4107
Author(s):  
Di He ◽  
Yusong Yu ◽  
Yucheng Kuang ◽  
Chaojun Wang

The reasonably accurate numerical simulation of methane–air combustion is important for engineering purposes. In the present work, the validations of sub-models were carried out on a laboratory-scale turbulent jet flame, Sandia Flame D, in comparison with experimental data. The eddy dissipation concept (EDC), which assumes that the molecular mixing and subsequent combustion occur in the fine structures, was used for the turbulence–chemistry interaction. The standard k-ε model (SKE) with the standard or the changed model constant C1ε, the realizable k-ε model (RKE), the shear-stress transport k-ω model (SST), and the Reynolds stress model (RSM) were compared with the detailed chemical kinetic mechanism of GRI-Mech 3.0. Different reaction treatments for the methane–air combustion were also validated with the available experimental data from the literature. In general, there were good agreements between predictions and measurements, which gave a good indication of the adequacy and accuracy of the method and its further applications for industry-scale turbulent combustion simulations. The differences between predictions and measured data might have come from the simplifications of the boundary settings, the turbulence model, the turbulence–reaction interaction, and the radiation heat transfer model. For engineering predictions of methane–air combustion, the mixture fraction probability density function (PDF) model for the partially premixed combustion with RSM is recommended due to its relatively low simulation expenses, acceptable accuracy predictions, and quantitatively good agreement with the experiments.


2006 ◽  
Vol 128 (12) ◽  
pp. 1243-1256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gopinath R. Warrier ◽  
Vijay K. Dhir

In this paper we provide a review of heat transfer and wall heat flux partitioning models/correlations applicable to subcooled forced flow nucleate boiling. Details of both empirical and mechanistic models that have been proposed in the literature are provided. A comparison of the experimental data with predictions from selected models is also included.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janardhan Kodavasal ◽  
Christopher P. Kolodziej ◽  
Stephen A. Ciatti ◽  
Sibendu Som

Gasoline compression ignition (GCI) is a low temperature combustion (LTC) concept that has been gaining increasing interest over the recent years owing to its potential to achieve diesel-like thermal efficiencies with significantly reduced engine-out nitrogen oxides (NOx) and soot emissions compared to diesel engines. In this work, closed-cycle computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed of this combustion mode using a sector mesh in an effort to understand effects of model settings on simulation results. One goal of this work is to provide recommendations for grid resolution, combustion model, chemical kinetic mechanism, and turbulence model to accurately capture experimental combustion characteristics. Grid resolutions ranging from 0.7 mm to 0.1 mm minimum cell sizes were evaluated in conjunction with both Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) and large eddy simulation (LES) based turbulence models. Solution of chemical kinetics using the multizone approach is evaluated against the detailed approach of solving chemistry in every cell. The relatively small primary reference fuel (PRF) mechanism (48 species) used in this study is also evaluated against a larger 312-species gasoline mechanism. Based on these studies, the following model settings are chosen keeping in mind both accuracy and computation costs—0.175 mm minimum cell size grid, RANS turbulence model, 48-species PRF mechanism, and multizone chemistry solution with bin limits of 5 K in temperature and 0.05 in equivalence ratio. With these settings, the performance of the CFD model is evaluated against experimental results corresponding to a low load start of injection (SOI) timing sweep. The model is then exercised to investigate the effect of SOI on combustion phasing with constant intake valve closing (IVC) conditions and fueling over a range of SOI timings to isolate the impact of SOI on charge preparation and ignition. Simulation results indicate that there is an optimum SOI timing, in this case −30 deg aTDC (after top dead center), which results in the most stable combustion. Advancing injection with respect to this point leads to significant fuel mass burning in the colder squish region, leading to retarded phasing and ultimately misfire for SOI timings earlier than −42 deg aTDC. On the other hand, retarding injection beyond this optimum timing results in reduced residence time available for gasoline ignition kinetics, and also leads to retarded phasing, with misfire at SOI timings later than −15 deg aTDC.


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