Experimental characterization of aviation-fuel cavitation

Abstract

The results of an experimental investigation of the gaseous cavitation of JP-8 aviation fuel in a converging-diverging nozzle are presented. Fuel cavitation is experimentally characterized by high-speed digital imaging, static pressure distributions, and nonintrusive void fraction and bubble velocity measurements. For comparative purposes, experiments were performed using distilled water and dodecane for the same nozzle and nozzle pressure ratios. Dodecane, the largest component of JP-8 by weight, served as its single-component surrogate. For each working fluid, the experiments examined two different flow regimes: an initially single-phase liquid flow in which no cavitation occurred and another that evolved into two-phase cavitating flow. Additional experiments were performed to study the effect of air bubbles injected into either water or JP-8 at the nozzle inlet. For a sufficiently low range of imposed back pressures, gaseous cavitation led to choked flow for each working fluid. The character of the cavitation in the three fluids was different. These differences are highlighted and plausible mechanisms responsible for the observed behavior are discussed.