Computational Assessment of Gaseous Reacting Flows in Single Element Injector

Abstract

The injector flow is challenging to predict due to the complex physics involving recirculation, turbulence, mixing between multiple species and chemical reactions. This work is aimed at assessing the capability of a RANS-based computational modeling tool for gaseous injector flows. Both combustion effectiveness and chamber wall heat transfer profiles are examined to shed light on issues most pertinent to injector design. Two injector flow experiments by different researchers have been adopted to facilitate a direct comparison of the wall heat transfer data. For mixing-dominated cases studied in these experiments, without detailed account for turbulence-chemistry interactions, particular choice of the chemical kinetics scheme is shown to be of minor importance. The near wall treatment of the turbulence model can noticeably impact the outcome of the simulation. While the results reported by various researchers for the same experiment vary noticeably, it seems that refinements of turbulence-chemistry interactions and the near wall treatment are needed. Copyright © 2009 by Emre Sozer.