Multi-Phase Flame Propagation Modeling for Present and Future Combustors and Augmentors

The proposed project will develop advanced modeling capabilities for high-fidelity liquid-fuel spray calculations. State-of-the-art multiphase combustion models will be implemented in a volume-filtered Eulerian-Lagrangian framework that can easily be ported into existing CFD codes. Unlike traditional methods, the proposed strategy will ensure convergence under mesh refinement of the interphase exchange terms using a novel two-step filtering approach. The filtering process will remove any restriction on the fluid mesh size to droplet diameter ratio, thereby enabling the use of arbitrarily fine meshes for a given drop size distribution. Within this framework, liquid-phase combustion will be calibrated for the specific gas-phase combustion employed. A reduced-order model for evaporation will be developed using detailed single-droplet simulations. Rate parameters will be determined a-priori using gas-phase compositions obtained from prior CFD runs or canonical flows and stored in tabulated form, which can then be loaded into the main CFD run. The outcome of this work will demonstrate, for the first time, a robust and scalable approach capable of simultaneously handling the dense liquid regime near the injector and dilute regime downstream where ignition occurs.