EAGER: Establishment of a High-Fidelity Simulation Infrastructure for Fuel Injection and Combustion in Supersonic Flows

Baylor University, Waco TX

Investigators

Abstract

The characteristics of the fuel droplets have a direct impact on the efficiency of a combustor. In supersonic propulsion systems, the details of the fuel injection process are difficult to measure in experiments. A high-fidelity computational framework for simulating liquid fuel dynamics in supersonic propulsion systems will be developed. The proposed computer program can be used to improve injector designs for high fuel efficiency and low pollutant emissions in supersonic aircrafts and rockets. The proposed computational framework will allow researchers to perform simulations on supercomputers that produce more detailed data than experiments can provide. The simulation program developed in this project will be open-source, based on which other researchers can develop new simulation capabilities. The outcome of this project will benefit both academia and industry of supersonic propulsion. Along with the research project, an exhibition on fuel injection will be developed for Baylor's Mayborn Museum. This exhibition will use the results obtained in this project to introduce fuel injection technologies to audiences of all ages. To accurately capture the gas-liquid interface and the complex topology changes due to breakup, a mass- and momentum-conserving volume-of- fluid method for compressible flows will be developed. High-order shock-capturing methods will be incorporated to resolve shock waves and shock-interface interactions. The Height-Function method will be used to calculate the interface curvature, and the balanced-force surface tension calculation will be extended to compressible flows. The above numerical methods will also be generalized for the quad/octree data structure to allow adaptive mesh refinement in user-defined regions. The parallelization of the code will be done through a tree decomposition approach instead of the conventional domain decomposition. As a result, the parallel performance will remain excellent even if a large number of refinement levels are used. Four different experiments of liquid jet breakups in subsonic and supersonic regimes will be simulated and compared to experimental measurements to validate the predictive capability of the proposed simulation framework. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.