Journal of Physics: Conference Series

PAPER • OPEN ACCESS You may also like

- CFD Analysis of Scramjet Engine
CFD Analysis of Scramjet Engine Combustion Combustion Chamber with Diamond-
Shaped Strut Injector at Flight Mach 4.5
Chamber with Alternating Wedge-Shaped Strut Sukanta Roga

- Numerical study of the enhancement of

Injector at Flight Mach 6.5 combustion performance in a scramjet
combustor due to injection of electric-
discharge-activated oxygen molecules
To cite this article: Sukanta Roga 2019 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 1276 012038 A M Starik, L V Bezgin, V I Kopchenov et
al.

- Ideal performance analysis of the scramjet

with Pre-jet fuel
Shengsheng Zhang, Yu Xue, Yang Yang
View the article online for updates and enhancements. et al.

This content was downloaded from IP address 103.151.156.15 on 15/03/2022 at 05:19

International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

CFD Analysis of Scramjet Engine Combustion Chamber with

Alternating Wedge-Shaped Strut Injector at Flight Mach 6.5

Dr. Sukanta Roga

Department of Mechanical Engineering
Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur-40010, India
[email protected]

Abstract. This paper presents the CFD analysis for hydrogen fueled scramjet engine using
alternating wedge-shaped strut injectors at flight Mach 6.5. The fuel used by alternating wedge-
shaped strut injectors is hydrogen and this present work is constructed on the species transport
combustion and k-epsilon turbulence model which is governed by both mixing and chemical
kinetics. This turbulence model is most common in CFD for simulation of mean flow
characteristics for turbulent flow conditions. This CFD analysis of scramjet engine combustion
chamber is basically focused on for optimizing various flow fields of flue gases and the
combustion efficiency. There is increase in temperature and pressure at the boundary walls of
the combustor. The shock waves have great influences on increasing the pressure and
temperature which results in increasing at the combustion rate as well as it increases the
combustion efficiency. From the analysis it’s investigated that alternating wedge-shaped strut
injector provides the maximum temperature and pressure of 3825K and 1650784Pa
respectively.

Keywords: CFD, efficiency, flight Mach, scramjet engine

1. Introduction
1.1. Scramjet engines
The scramjet is a generous of jet engine anticipated to operate in the high speed regime
typically associated by rockets. The scramjet engine has designed is a postponement of ramjet engine.
The difference between the scramjet and ramjet lies in flow of state inside the engine. This engine works
by injecting the hydrogen into the supersonic air flow.

1.2. Fuel injectors for scramjet engine

Fuel injection techniques for scramjet engines are developing today. The fuel used in scramjets is
either a gas or a liquid. For efficient combustion stoichiometric proportions of air and fuel are play an
important role. Here the issue is the airflow is very fast and there is negligible time for the fuel to mix
with air and ignite for producing thrust. H2 is the main fuel for combustion. Hydrocarbons are
additional of a task compared to H2 due to the more ignition delay and the requirement for more
unconventional mixing techniques. By improving the mixing, minimising the combustor distance is an
significant feature in scheming scramjet engines.

1.2.1. Parallel, normal and transverse injection

The figure 1 shows the parallel fuel injector structure which in which air and fuel inject in a parallel
way but divided by divider plate. At the exit portion of the splitter plate the shear layer is produced
because of dissimilarities of velocities of air/fuel.

Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution
of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd 1
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

Source: IJCEA, Vol. 1(4)

Figure 1. Parallel fuel injector

Normal fuel injector comprises an injection port on the combustor wall which injects fuel in a common
procedure in the flow of air. This kind of system produces barrel shock and mixing shock which results
the separation zone at downstream and upstream of injector system which is presented in below figure 2.
These separation regions are responsible for the increased in pressure losses and it affects the engine
efficiency [1].

Source: IJCEA, Vol. 1(4)

Figure 2. Normal fuel injection

2. Literature Review
Tomioka et al. [2,3] found that at higher flow rates the intensive combustion within the constant
area combustor is acquired. The pressure rise enhances with the auxiliary fuel injection from the strut
injector which increase the fuel/air mixing quality. The incoming flow is divided into 2 parts. The
pressure on diamond surface of the strut is assessed with a statement that the static pressure rise on the
side wall is since the incident and reflected shocks with the same strength. Aleksandrov et al. [4]
worked on hypersonic engine and it is observed that there is a capability for the boundary cooling of
the scramjet combustor by air form improving the engine efficiency. Rabadan and Weigand [5] stated
that with the increase of equivalence ratio combustion process will be more stronger, which results the
movement of shock train produces with various pressure variations after numerical investigation.
Baurle [6] addressed a comprehensive summary of several CFD techniques for the demonstration of
supersonic flows. The necessity for steady state RANS in solving the compressible reacting flow for
high speed commercial and military application. The superiority of advanced order Reynolds stress
tensor model over linear models are used for predicting the mixing and combustion efficiency. Pan et
al. [7] investigated that the air is injected at the temperature of 340K and a pressure of 0.1 Mpa
whereas the hydrogen is injected at ambient temperature and pressure of 250K and 0.1 Mpa
respectively. The accuracy of the CFD results for scramjet combustor is significantly depends on the
fineness of a grid. The computational domain is said to enter into the regime of the grid independence
and hence, this limit is called the ‘Grid Independent Limit (GIL)’. The combustion flame is more
stabilized in case of cavities in tandem than cavities in parallel while combustion process is better in
cavities in parallel at the inflow conditions of flight Mach .64 and 1.84MPa of pressure.

2
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

3. Material and methods

3.1. Physical model
The figure 3 presents the physical model of the DLR based scramjet engine which is investigated by
Oevermann [8]. The total length of the combustor is 340 mm in stream wise direction and the
backward spacing arrow shows the fuel injector for alternating wedge-shaped strut structure. The
upper wall of the combustor is 30 of inclination just after the 100 mm from the leading edge which
are shown in figure 3 and figure 4.

Figure 3. Physical model of alternating wedge-shaped strut injector

(a)

(b) (c)

Figure 4. (a) Alternating wedge-shaped strut injector, (b) Isometric view of alternating wedge-shaped
strut injector and (c) Side view of the injector

3
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

3.2. Grid Independence Study

3500
Static temperature in K 3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0

No. of nodes

Figure 5. Grid independence study

The figure 5 show the specification and justifications of the grid and grid independence study for the
present strut injector and from the table 1 and figure 5 it is observed that better agreement is found
between 118795, 152879 and 198227 no of nodes. Therefore the present analysis is done with a grid
size of 152879 nodes whereas the figure 6 shows the drid refinement for alternating wedge-shaped
strut injector.

Figure 6. Grid refinement for alternating wedge-shaped strut injector

The changes of cell face and node are 743033, 11174319 and 369115 respectively which are shown in
below in details;
Grid size (Original / Adapted / Change)
Cells (84631 / 858934 / 774303)
Faces (271384 / 11445703 / 11174319)
Nodes (152879 / 998234 / 369115)

3.3. Validation of the model

The present supersonic combustor model is validated by comparing contours of density image with the
shadowgraph image from the experiment which is shown in figure 7. From the figure 7 it is evident
that the contours of density image and the shadowgraph image from the experiment are agreed very
well.

4
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

Figure 7. Shadowgraph image from experiment (Top) and contours plot of density of the present
work (Bottom)

3.4. Governing equations

The different governing equations used for the present analysis is mentioned below [9]:

3.4.1. Continuity equation

!" ! "& ! "( ! "*
+ + + = 0 (1)
!# !' !) !+

3.4.2. Momentum equation in X direction

! "& ! "&& ! "(& ! "*& !.// !01/ !02/
+ + + = + + (2)
!# !' !) !+ !' !) !+

3.4.3. Momentum equation in Y direction

!("() !("&() !("(() !("*() !.11 !0/1 !021
+ + + + = + (3)
!# !' !) !+ !) !' !+

3.4.4. Momentum equation in Z direction

!("*) !("&*) !("(*) !("**) !0/2 !012 !.22
+ + + = + + (4)
!# !' !) !+ !' !) !+

3.4.5. Energy equation

! "5 ! "&5 ! "(5 ! "*5 !(&02/ 6(021 6*"22 )
89
!(78: ) 89
!(78; ) ! 789
8<
+ + + + = + + (5)
!# !' !) !+ !+ !' !) !+
?
E=e+ u@ + v @ + w @ (6)
@

The equations from 1 to 6 are stands for compressible flows whereas the below 3 equations are
using as a supplementary equations for the above mentioned equations.
First, for the perfect gas
P = ρRT (7)
Second, assuming that air is calorically perfect.
e = C( T (8)
where Cv is the specific heat at constant volume.

Third, if the Prandtl number is considered as constant:

JKL
k= (9)
MN

Equations used with Sutherland’s law are mentioned below:

5
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

Q ?.T QR 6?@P
µ = µP (10)
QR Q6?@P

3.4.6. Generalized form of turbulence equation

V 8X V 8X V 8X
! 9 ! 9 ! 9
!U !(&U) !((U) !((U) WX 8/ WX 81 WX 82
k + + + = + + + (Sk = P – D) (11)
!# !' !) !+ !' !) !+
V 8[ V 8[ V 8[
! 9 ! 9 ! 9
!Z !(&Z) !((Z) !(*Z) WX 8/ WX 81 WX 82 Z
(ε) + + + = + + + (S] = (CZ? P − CZ@ D) (12)
!# !' !) !+ !' !) !+ U

!& @ !( @ !* @ !& !( @ !( !* @ !* !& @

where P = 2vQ + + + vQ + + + + + and D = ε
!' !) !+ !) !' !+ !) !' !+

4. Results and discussion

The CFD analysis of scramjet engine combustion chamber using alternating wedge-shaped strut
injector are discussed below:

4.1. Static pressure

Figure 8. Contours of static pressure in Pa

Figure 9. Static pressure vs. position

The figure 8 represents the contours of static pressure for the alternating wedge-shaped strut injector
and from this contour plot it is evident that the maximum pressure of 165.078 KPa is attained. The
figure 9 represents the static pressure distribution at lower and upper walls of the entire combustor and
it is visualized from this figure that maximum static pressure attained at the lower wall is followed by
the upper wall.

6
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

4.2. Static temperature

Figure 10. Contours of static temperature in K

Figure 11. Static temperature vs. position

Figure 10 represents the contours of static temperature of alternating wedge-shaped injector. The
temperature increases drastically at the central zone of the chamber. The maximum temperature of
3825K is attained to be at recirculation areas of the supersonic combustion chamber which is evident
from this figure 10 whereas the figure 11 represents the static temperature distribution at the lower and
the upper wall.

4.3. Contours Mach number

Figure 12. Contours of Mach number

7
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

Figure 13. Mach number vs. position

The contours of Mach number distribution for the present combustor chamber shown in figure 12. At
the combustor chamber with alternating wedge-shaped injector the highest Mach number is found to
be 6.53 which is observed from the figure 12. The time taken for the mixing of fuel with air get
delayed with the increase in Mach number of air. The figure 13 represents the variation of Mach
number with respect to lower wall and the upper wall for alternating wedge-shaped strut injector.

4.4. Density Contours

Figure 14. Density Contours

The contours of density for the present injector is represented in figure 14 and from this figure it is
investigated that due to combustion the shock structures getting weaker at the downstream of the
combustion chamber. The shockwaves are greatly reflected by lower and upper walls of the
combustion chamber. The maximum density of around 1.014 kg/m3 is attained in the alternating
wedge-shaped strut injector.

4.5. Contours of H2 mass fraction

Figure 15. H2 mass fraction

8
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

The figure 15 represent the H2 mass fraction for the present strut injector. The maximum mass fraction
of H2 is attained at the gradient of the fuel inlet of the present strut injector and then mass fraction of
H2 starts decreasing along the axis. As this kind of strut injector H2 burns properly, there is smaller
amount of flue gas emmisions.
4.6. Combustion efficiency

100
Comb. efficiency (%)

80

60 Combustion efficiency

40

20

Distance (m)

Figure 16. Combustion efficiency

Combustion efficiency is the useful parameter for identifying the performance of the scramjet engine.
Combustion efficiency (ηComb) implies the quantity of H2 burned at a specified cross section, Ax with
respect to the total amount of injected H2 which is given by Gerlinger [10] and it’s shown below:
a ' "bcd &efg ha
ηComb(x) = 1 - (13)
ijg,lmn

where r and Yj@ are gas density and H2 mass fraction respectively. The term mH@,rst represents the
mass flux injected H2 and u represents the velocity component which is normal to the cross section.
The figure 16 represents the combustion efficiency where the plot starts right after the trailing edge of
the present strut injector (x = 340 mm). The maximum combustion efficiency is found to be 91.1% for
the stoichiometric value (φ) of 1.

5. Conclusion
The very little ignition delay time of fuel and air mixture favors the efficient and profligate
combustion; therefore there is progress of combustion efficiency. Since the time taken for the mixing
of fuel and air very less, about millisecond so better injection technique has to be develop which must
improve the mixing quality of fuel and air. Higher incoming Mach number and equivalence ratio
prevent the appropriate mixing of fuel and air. The durable vorticity formed by the present wedge-
shaped injector and it is liable for the mixing of fuel and air. The local recirculation zones with high
residence time are formed in the combustors due to these shock waves and accordingly the combustion
process is improved.

Nomenclature
C Specific heat at constant volume
CFD Computational fluid dynamics
H2 Hydrogen
GIL Grid independent limit
k Turbulence kinetic energy
LES Large eddy simulations
ηComb Combustion efficiency

9
International Conference on Recent Advances in Fluid and Thermal Sciences IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Journal of Physics: Conf. Series 1276 (2019) 012038 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1276/1/012038

φ Stoichiometric condition
ρ Density
ɛ Turbulence dissipation rate
ρ Density
µ Viscosity
µ0 and T0 Reference values at standard sea level conditions

References
[1] Pandey, K. M., Roga, S., and Choubey, G. (2016). Numerical Investigation on Hydrogen-Fueled
Scramjet Combustor with Parallel Strut Fuel Injector at a Flight Mach Number of 6. Journal of
Applied Fluid Mechanics, vol 9(3), pp 1215-1220.
[2] Tomioka, S, Kanda, T., Tani, K. , Mitani, T. Shimura, T., and Chinzei, N. (1998). Testing of a
scramjet engine with a strut in m8 flight conditions, 34th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint
Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, Cleveland, OH, U.S.A, AIAAJournal, pp 1-8.
[3] Tomioka, S., Murakami, A., Kudo, K. and Mitani, (2001). Combustion tests of a staged
supersonic combustor with a strut, Journal of Propulsion and Power, AIAA Journal, vol 17(2),
pp 293-300.
[4] Aleksandrov, V. Y., Prokhorov, A. N. and Semenov, V. L. (2010). Hypersonic technology
development concerning high speed air-breathing engines, 10th International Congress of Fluid
Dynamics, AinSoukhna, Red Sea, Egypt, pp 1-15, 16-19.
[5] Rabadan, E., and Weigand, B. (2012). Numerical investigation of inlet-combustor interactions
for a scramjet hydrogen-fueled engine at a flight Mach number of 8, 18th AIAA/3AF International
Space Planes and Hypersonic Systems and Technologies Conference, Paper ID: AIAA-2012-
5926, Tours, France.
[6] Baurle, R. A. (2004). Modeling of high speed reacting flows: established practices and future
challenges, 42nd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, Nevada, AIAA 2004-
267, pp 1-15.
[7] Pan, Y., Tan, J. G., Liang, J. H., Liu, W. D., and Wang, Z. G. (2011). Experimental
investigation of Combustion Mechanism of Kerosene-Fueled Scramjet Engines with Double-
Cavity Flame Holders, Acta Mech. Sin., Springer, vol 27(6), pp 891-897.
[8] Oevermann, M. (2000). Numerical investigation of turbulent hydrogen combustion in a scramjet
using flamelet modeling, Aerospace Science and Technology, vol 4, pp 463-480.
[9] Tu, J., Yeoh, G. H., and Liu, C. (2008). Computational fluid dynamics, Elsivier Inc.
[10] Gerlinger, P., and Bruggemann, D., (2000). Numerical investigation of hydrogen strut injections
into supersonic airflows, Journal of Propulsion and Power, vol 16(1), pp 22-28.
[11] Pandey, K. M., and Roga, S. (2014). CFD analysis of scramjet combustor with non-premixed
turbulence model using ramp injector. Scientific.Net, Applied Mechanics and Materials, vol 555,
pp 18-25.
[12] Pandey, K. M., Roga, S., and Choubey, G. (2015). Computational analysis of hypersonic
combustion chamber using strut injector at flight mach 7. Combustion Science and Technology,
vol 187, pp 1392-1407.
[13] Pandey, K. M., and Roga, S. (2014). CFD analysis of hypersonic combustion of H2-fueled
scramjet combustor with cavity based fuel injector at flight Mach 6. Scientific.Net, Applied
Mechanics and Material, vol 656, 53-63.

10