Efficiency Methodologies for Chemical Reactions of JP-8

As maintaining a stable combustion process is a major challenge associated with augmentor design and operation, numerical simulations are necessary to understand the combustion process and develop control strategies. Thus, it is essential to have reliable reduced kinetic models that are capable of predicting transient combustion phenomena such as ignition and extinction under augmentor operating conditions. Combustion Science & Engineering, Inc. proposes to develop a robust computationally efficient reduced kinetic modeling tool for aviation jet fuels that can be coupled with unsteady flow models such as LES to simulate static stability limits in augmentors. CSE will develop computational tools to develop varying sizes of reduced kinetic models using lumped-parameterization as well as time-scale based dimensional reduction methods. These approaches will be coupled with in Situ Adaptive Tabulation (ISAT) scheme to accelerate the computational speed of CFD simulation of practical devices such as augmenters with reliable combustion chemistry. BENEFIT: The ultimate result of this research will be the development of a modeling tool that will be useful for engineers to design combustors, augmenters and other flameholding devices in practical applications. This will provide a design tool for predicting static stability limits and flame propagation in afterburner combustion systems. The market for this product will include gas turbine designers and manufacturers for both military and civilian aircraft. The use of this tool will significantly reduce development costs by eliminating some design iterations and hardware testing, which is quite expensive and time-consuming.