Skeletal Kinetic Modeling for the Combustion of Endothermic Hydrocarbon Fuel in Hypersonic Vehicle

Chemical kinetic mechanism plays a vital role in the deep learning of reacting flow in practical combustors, which can help obtain many details of the combustion process. In this paper, a surrogate model and a skeletal mechanism for an endothermic hydrocarbon fuel were developed for further investigations of the combustion performance in hypersonic vehicles: (1) The surrogate model consists of 81.3 mol% decalin and 18.7 mol% n-dodecane, which were determined by both the composition distributions and key properties of the target endothermic hydrocarbon fuel. (2) A skeletal kinetic mechanism only containing 56 species and 283 reactions was developed by the method of “core mechanism​ sub mechanism”. This mechanism can be conveniently applied to the simulation of practical combustors for its affordable scale. (3) Accuracies of the surrogate model and the mechanism were systematically validated by the various properties of the target fuel under pressures of 1-20atm, temperatures of 400-1250K, and equivalence ratios of 0.5-1.5. The overall errors for the ignition and combustion properties are no more than 0.4 and 0.1, respectively. (4) Laminar flame speeds of the target fuel and the surrogate model fuel were also measured for the validations. Results show that both the surrogate model and the mechanism can well predict the properties of the target fuel. The mechanism developed in this work is valuable to the further design and optimization of the propulsion systems.

Experimental investigation of thermodynamic instability of supercritical endothermic hydrocarbon fuel within a small-scale channel

A series of experiments were performed to investigate the thermodynamic instabilities that occur during heating of supercritical endothermic hydrocarbon fuel. A “power–temperature drop” characteristic curve is used to analyze the mechanism of thermodynamic instabilities. The results indicate that the heat-transfer process in a heated tube with increasing heating power can be divided into three periods: stable, developing, and instable; in which, the thermodynamic instabilities are found to occur. When the outlet fuel temperature reaches the pseudo-critical temperature, an acute decrease in fuel density and viscosity causes the flow to change from a transition flow to a turbulent flow, and the sharp increase of heat transfer in turbulent flow increases the thermodynamic instabilities. The intensity of the instability is related to the kinetic energy of the flow and the oscillatory extent. When the mass flow rate is increased from 1.0 to 1.5 g/s, the effect on the flow’s kinetic energy dominates the change in instability which causes the intensity of the instability to increase. While the intensity of the instability decreases with increasing inlet fuel temperature, which results from the decrease of the oscillatory extent. The effects of the operating pressure on the instability are not linear because of the properties of fuel change, obviously with pressure near the critical point.