A Systematic Experimental and Computational Investigation of a Class of Contoured Wall Fuel Injectors

The performance of a particular class of fuel injectors for scramjet engine applications is addressed. The contoured wall injectors were aimed at augmenting mixing through axial vorticity production arising from interaction of the fueVair interface with an oblique shock. Helium was used to simulate hydrogen fuel and was injected at Mach 1.7 into a Mach 6 airstream. The effects of incoming boundary layer height. injector spacing, and injectant to freestream pressure and velocity ratios were investigated. Results from threedimensional flow field surveys and Navier-Stokes simulations are presented. Performance was judged in terms of mixing, loss generation and jet penetration. Injector performance was strongly dependent on the displacement effect of the hypersonic boundary layer which acted to modify the effective wall geometry. The impact of the boundary layer varied with injector array spacing. Widely-spaced arrays were more resilient to the detrimental effects of large boundary layers. Strong dependence on injectant to free stream pressure ratio was also displayed. Pressure ratios near unity were most conducive to losseffective mixing and strong jet penetration. Effects due to variation in mean shear associated with non-unity velocity ratios were found to be secondary within the small range of values tested

Shock enhancement and control of hypersonic mixing and combustion

The possibility that shock enhanced mixing can substantially increase the rate of mixing between coflowing streams of hydrogen and air has been studied in experimental and computational investigations. Early numerical computations indicated that the steady interaction between a weak shock in air with a coflowing hydrogen jet can be well approximated by the two-dimensional time-dependent interaction between a weak shock and an initially circular region filled with hydrogen imbedded in air. An experimental investigation of the latter process has been carned out in the Caltech 17 Inch Shock Tube in experiments in which the laser induced fluorescence of byacetyl dye is used as a tracer for the motion of the helium gas after shock waves have passed across the helium cylinder. The flow field has also been studied using an Euler code computation of the flow field. Both investigations show that the shock impinging process causes the light gas cylinder to split into two parts. One of these mixes rapidly with air and the other forms a stably stratified vortex pair which mixes more slowly; about 60% of the light gas mixes rapidly with the ambient fluid. The geometry of the flow field and the mixing process and scaling parameters are discussed here. The success of this program encouraged the exploration of a low drag injection system in which the basic concept of shock generated streamwise vorticity could be incorporated in an injector for a Scramjet combustor at Mach numbers between 5 and 8. The results of a substantial computational program and a description of the wind tunnel model and preliminary experimental results obtained in the High Reynolds Number Mach 6 Tunnel at NASA Langley Research Center are given here

Planar Rayleigh scattering results in helium-air mixing experiments in a Mach-6 wind tunnel

Planar Rayleigh scattering measurements with an argon—fluoride excimer laser are performed to investigate helium mixing into air at supersonic speeds. The capability of the Rayleigh scattering technique for flow visualization of a turbulent environment is demonstrated in a large-scale, Mach-6 facility. The detection limit obtained with the present setup indicates that planar, quantitative measurements of density can be made over a large cross-sectional area (5 cm × 10 cm) of the flow field in the absence of clusters

An investigation of a contoured wall injector for hypervelocity mixing augmentation

An experimental and computational investigation of a contoured wall fuel injector is presented. The injector was aimed at enabling shock-enhanced mixing for the supersonic combustion ramjet engines currently envisioned for applications on hypersonic vehicles. Three-dimensional flow field surveys, and temporally resolved planar Rayleigh scattering measurements are presented for Mach 1.7 helium injection into Mach 6 air. These experimental data are compared directly with a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes simulation of the flow about the injector array. Two dominant axial vorticity sources are identified and characterized. The axial vorticity produced strong convective mixing of the injectant with the freestream. Shock-impingement was particularly effective as it assured seeding of baroclinic vorticity directly on the helium/air interface. The vorticity coalesced into a counter-rotating vortex pair of a sense which produced migration of the helium away from the wall. The influences of spatial averaging on the representation of the flow field as well as the importance of the fluctuating component of the flow in producing molecularly-mixed fluid are addressed

Sub-harmonic resonant excitation of confined acoustic modes at GHz frequencies with a high-repetition-rate femtosecond laser

We propose sub-harmonic resonant optical excitation with femtosecond lasers as a new method for the characterization of phononic and nanomechanical systems in the gigahertz to terahertz frequency range. This method is applied for the investigation of confined acoustic modes in a free-standing semiconductor membrane. By tuning the repetition rate of a femtosecond laser through a sub-harmonic of a mechanical resonance we amplify the mechanical amplitude, directly measure the linewidth with megahertz resolution, infer the lifetime of the coherently excited vibrational states, accurately determine the system's quality factor, and determine the amplitude of the mechanical motion with femtometer resolution