Comparison of Mixing Characteristics for Several Fuel Injectors at Mach 8, 12, and 15 Hypervelocity Flow Conditions

CFD analysis is presented of the mixing characteristics and performance of three fuel injectors at flight Mach numbers of 8, 12, and 15. The Reynolds-averaged simulations (RAS) were carried out using the VULCAN-CFD solver. The high Mach number flow conditions match those of the experiments conducted as a part of the Enhanced Injection and Mixing Project (EIMP) at the NASA Langley Research Center. The EIMP aims to investigate scramjet fuel injection and mixing physics, improve the understanding of underlying physical processes, and develop enhancement strategies relevant to flight Mach numbers greater than 8. The injectors include a fuel placement device, a strut, and a fluidic vortical mixer, a ramp. These fuel injectors accomplish the necessary task of distributing and mixing fuel into the supersonic cross-flow, albeit via different strategies. For comparison, a flush-wall injector is also included. This type of injector generally represents the simplest method of introducing fuel into a scramjet combustor. The three injectors represent the baseline configurations of the EIMP experiments. The mixing parameters of interest, such as mixing efficiency and total pressure recovery, are computed from the RAS and compared for the three flight conditions and injector configurations. In addition to mixing efficiency and total pressure recovery, the combustion efficiency and thrust potential are also computed for the reacting simulations. Plotting the total pressure recovery and thrust potential as a function of mixing efficiency provides added insight into critical aspects of combustor performance as the flight condition and injector type are varied

ASCI visualization tool evaluation, Version 2.0

The charter of the ASCI Visualization Common Tools subgroup was to investigate and evaluate 3D scientific visualization tools. As part of that effort, a Tri-Lab evaluation effort was launched in February of 1996. The first step was to agree on a thoroughly documented list of 32 features against which all tool candidates would be evaluated. These evaluation criteria were both gleaned from a user survey and determined from informed extrapolation into the future, particularly as concerns the 3D nature and extremely large size of ASCI data sets. The second step was to winnow a field of 41 candidate tools down to 11. The selection principle was to be as inclusive as practical, retaining every tool that seemed to hold any promise of fulfilling all of ASCI`s visualization needs. These 11 tools were then closely investigated by volunteer evaluators distributed across LANL, LLNL, and SNL. This report contains the results of those evaluations, as well as a discussion of the evaluation philosophy and criteria

The Detection of Change in Spatial Processes With Environmental Applications

Ever since Halley (1686) superimposed onto a map of land forms, the direction of trade winds and monsoons between and near the tropics and attempted to assign them a physical cause, homo-sapiens has attempted to develop procedures which quantify the level of change in a spatial process, or assess the relationship between associated spatially measured variables. Most spatial data, whether it be originally point, linear or areal in nature, can be converted by a suitable procedure into a continuous form and plotted as an isarithmic map i.e. points of equal height are joined. Once in that form it may be regarded as a statistical surface in which height varies over area in much the same way as the terrain varies on topographic maps. Particularly in environmental statistics, the underlying shape of the surface is unknown, and hence the use of non-parametric techniques is wholly appropriate. For most applications, the location of data points is beyond the control of the map-maker hence the analyst must cope with irregularly spaced data points. A variety of possible techniques for describing a surface are given in chapter two, with attention focusing on the methodology surrounding kernel density estimation. Once a surface has been produced to describe a set of data, a decision concerning the number of contours and how they should be selected has to be taken. When comparing two sets of data, it is imperative that the contours selected are chosen using the same criteria. A data based procedure is developed in chapter three which ensures comparability of the surfaces and hence spurious conclusions are not reached as a result of inconsistencies between surfaces. Contained within this chapter is a discussion of issues which relate to other aspects of how a contour should be drawn to minimise the potential for inaccuracies in the surface fitting methodology. Chapter four focuses on a whole wealth of techniques which are currently available for comparing surfaces. These range from the simplest method of overlaying two maps and visually comparing them to more involved techniques which require intensive numerical computation. It is the formalisation of the former of these techniques which forms the basis of the methodology developed in the following two chapters to discern whether change/association has materialised between variables. One means of quantifying change between two surfaces, represented as a contoured surface, is in terms of the transformation which would be required for the two surfaces to be matched. Mathematically, transformations are described in terms of rotation, translation and scalar change. Chapter five provides a geometrical interpretation of the three transformations in terms of area, perimeter, orientation and the centre of gravity of the contour of interest and their associated properties. Although grid resolution is fundamentally a secondary level of smoothing, this aspect of surface fitting has generally been ignored. However to ensure consistency across surfaces, it is necessary to decide firstly, whether data sets of different sizes should be depicted using different mesh resolutions and secondly, how fine a resolution provides optimal results, both in terms of execution time and inherent surface variability. This aspect is examined with particular reference to the geometric descriptors used to quantify change. The question of random noise contained within a measurement process has been ignored in the analysis to this point. However in practice, some form of noise will always be contained within a process. Quantifying the level of noise attributable to a process can prove difficult since the scientist may be over optimistic in his evaluation of the noise level. In developing a suitable set of test statistics, four situations were examined, firstly when no noise was present and then for three levels of noise, the upper bounds of which were 5,15 and 25%. Based on these statistics, a series of hypothesis tests were developed to look at the question of change for individual contour levels i.e. local analysis, or alternatively for a whole surface by combining the statistics and effectively performing a multivariate test

Tropical Cyclone Wind Hazard Assessment for Southeast Part of Coastal Region of China

Tropical cyclone (TC) or typhoon wind hazard and risk are significant for China. The return period value of the maximum typhoon wind speed is used to characterize the typhoon wind hazard and assign wind load in building design code. Since the historical surface observations of typhoon wind speed are often scarce and of short period, the typhoon wind hazard assessment is often carried out using the wind field model and TC track model. For a few major cities in the coastal region of mainland China, simple or approximated wind field models and a circular subregion method (CSM) have been used to assess the typhoon wind hazard in different studies. However, there are differences among the values given by these studies and by the Chinese building design code. Moreover, there is a lack of a TC full track model simulating the TC from genesis to lysis developed for China. A TC full track model and a planetary wind field model (PBL) have been applied to assess the hurricane wind hazard for the U.S. and used to update the U.S. design code. This study finds this PBL wind field model is approximated and the effect of such approximation on the estimated hurricane wind hazards needs to be investigated. By using the best track dataset given by HURDAT, the TC full track model and a simplified version are developed for the U.S. The performance of the simplified TC full track model is verified and found to be comparable with the full version. For assessing the typhoon wind hazard for China, the best track dataset released from China Meteorological Administration (CMA) is used. The PBL wind field model is used with the CSM to assess a few coastal cities of mainland China. The practice is extended to cover the whole region of the southeast part of mainland China to develop the contour maps of the typhoon wind hazards. By using the CMA best track dataset, a full track model is developed for the western North Pacific basin. This full track model is combined again with the PBL wind field model to assess the typhoon wind hazard for mainland China. The results obtained by using the full track model are compared to those estimated by using CSM, by using long term ground observations and tabulated in the Chinese building code

Advanced Techniques for Design and Manufacturing in Marine Engineering

Modern engineering design processes are driven by the extensive use of numerical simulations; naval architecture and ocean engineering are no exception. Computational power has been improved over the last few decades; therefore, the integration of different tools such as CAD, FEM, CFD, and CAM has enabled complex modeling and manufacturing problems to be solved in a more feasible way. Classical naval design methodology can take advantage of this integration, giving rise to more robust designs in terms of shape, structural and hydrodynamic performances, and the manufacturing process.This Special Issue invites researchers and engineers from both academia and the industry to publish the latest progress in design and manufacturing techniques in marine engineering and to debate the current issues and future perspectives in this research area. Suitable topics for this issue include, but are not limited to, the following:CAD-based approaches for designing the hull and appendages of sailing and engine-powered boats and comparisons with traditional techniques;Finite element method applications to predict the structural performance of the whole boat or of a portion of it, with particular attention to the modeling of the material used;Embedded measurement systems for structural health monitoring;Determination of hydrodynamic efficiency using experimental, numerical, or semi-empiric methods for displacement and planning hulls;Topology optimization techniques to overcome traditional scantling criteria based on international standards;Applications of additive manufacturing to derive innovative shapes for internal reinforcements or sandwich hull structures

New methods using in-situ and remote-sensing observations for improved meteorological analysis

Observations have been and are an important part of today's meteorological developments. Surface observations are very useful as they are, providing weather information for a point location. ough they do not give much information, if any, on what happens between the stations across a larger area. With models one can create an analysis of the meteorological situation, i.e. calculate and estimate what happens between these fixed observation points. Remote-sensing data, such as radar and satellite, are being processed and the output is given over a domain as an analysed product of their measurements. For example, radar gives a plot of where the rain is located, i.e. an analysis of the current precipitation. With a series of radar images, a human (subjectively) or a computer objectively) can process this information to estimate where the rain will move and be located within the next few minutes (even hours), i.e. a short forecast also called "nowcast". is applies to some extent also for other observations, such as satellite data (cloud propagation). But for most quantities (such as temperature, wind, etc) it is significantly harder to make such a nowcast, since these are influenced by many other factors and there is no linear development of them. Therefore, there are forecast models that solve physical and dynamic equations, so that one can estimate the future weather for the coming hours and days. A prerequisite for generating a forecast of high quality is to capture the initial weather conditions as best as possible. This is done using observations and they are introduced into the forecast model through different techniques, where the model creates its own analysis as the initial step. There remain problems since forecast models often are affected by physical disagreements, as the dynamic conditions are not in balance. This results in the model having a spin-up effect, where the meteorological quantities are not yet in balance with each other and the resulting weather conditions are not always reliable during the first hours. Hence, a lot of research is spent on how to reduce this spin-up effect and on the use of nowcast models, in order to deliver the best model results for the first few hours of the forecast period. In this dissertation, the research work has been to improve the meteorological analysis, algorithms and functionality, using the Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) model. Different kinds of observations were used and their interdependencies have been studied, in order to combine and merge information from variousinstruments. Primarily focus has been to improve the estimation of precipitation accumulation and meteorological quantities that affect wind energy. The LAPS developments have been used for several end-users and nowcasting applications, and experimentally as initial conditions for forecast modelling. The studies have been concentrated on Finland and nearby sea areas, with the available datasets for this domain. By combining surface-station measurements, radar and lightning information, one can improve the precipitation-amount estimations. The use of lightning data further improves the estimates and gives the advantage of having additional data outside radar coverage, which can potentially be very useful for example over sea areas. In addition, the improved LAPS analyses (cloud-related quantities) and a newly developed model (LOWICE), calculating the electricity production during wintertime (taking into account the icing of wind turbine rotor blades which reduces efficiency), have shown good results

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 295)

This bibliography lists 581 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System in Sep. 1993. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment, and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics

Orthogonal Decomposition Methods for Turbulent Heat Transfer Analysis with Application to Gas Turbines

Gas turbine engines are the main propulsion source for world wide aviation and are also used for power generation. Even though they rely mainly on fossil fuel and emit climate active gasses, their importance is not likely to decrease in the future. But more efficient ways of using finite resources and hence reducing emissions have to be found. Thus, the interest to improve engine efficiency is growing. Considering the efficiency of the underlying thermodynamic cycle, an increase can be achieved by raising the turbine inlet temperature or compression ratio. Due to the complex nature of the underlying flow physics, however, the aero-thermal processes are still not fully understood. For this reason, one needs to perform research at high spatial and temporal resolution, in turn creating the need for effective means of postprocessing the large amounts of data. This dissertation addresses both sides of the problem - using high-scale, high resolution simulations as well as effective post processing techniques. As an example for the latter, a temporal highly resolved data set from wall pressure measurements of a transonic compressor stage is analyzed using proper orthogonal decomposition. The underlying experiments were performed by collaborators at Technical University Darmstadt. To decompose signals into optimal orthogonal basis functions based on temporal correlations including temperature, a formal mathematical framework is developed. A method to rank the reduced order representations with respect to heat transfer effectiveness is presented. To test both methods, a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulation and large eddy simulation (LES) are performed on turbulent heat transfer in a square duct with one single row of pin fins. While the LES results show closer agreement to experiments, both simulations unveil flow parts that do not contribute to heat transfer augmentation and can be considered wasteful. From the most effective mode, a wall contour for the same domain is derived and applied. In the wall contoured domain, energy in wasteful modes decreased, heat transfer increased and the temperature fluctuations at the wall decreased. Another stagnating boundary layer flow is examined in a direct numerical simulation of a first stage stator vane. Elevated levels of free stream turbulence and integral length scale are generated to simulate the features of combustor exit flow. The horseshoe vortex dynamics cause an increase in endwall heat transfer upstream of the vane. The link between energy optimal orthogonal basis functions and flow structures is examined using this data and the reduced order heat transfer analysis shows high energy modes with comparatively low impact on turbulent heat transfer. The analysis further shows that there are multiple horseshoe vortices that oscillate upstream of the blade, vanish, regenerate and can also merge. There is a punctual correlation of intense vortex dynamics and peaks in the orthogonal temperature basis function. For all data considered, the link between the energy optimal orthogonal basis functions and flow structures is neither guaranteed to exist nor straightforward to establish. The orthogonal expansion locks onto flow parts with high fluctuating kinetic energy - which might or might not be the ones that are looked for. The heat transfer ranking eliminates this problem and is valid independently of how certain basis functions are interpreted