Kinetic Mechanisms for Reacting Flow CFD

Development of scramjet engines is hindered by the lack of fast and accurate turbulent reacting flow CFD tools. In Phase I of this STTR project, Reaction Systems, LLC investigated a fundamentally new approach to reducing the computational burden of detailed chemistry that holds great promise in lowering this computational burden. This new approach significantly reduces the number of chemical species that must be tracked with conservation equations in the CFD code while simultaneously maintaining the accuracy of the original full detailed kinetic mechanism by rendering the relevant “chemical information” in a form that is readily accessible. In Phase II we will broaden the work already accomplished in Phase I by extending our current detailed kinetic mechanism to model JP-7 fuel, create a reduced JP-7 mechanism, then demonstrate using the reduced mechanism in a full-3D reacting flow CFD code. Success in this effort will substantially improve both the accuracy and productivity of CFD-based scramjet design work as well as open many commercial possibilities with current users of reacting flow CFD such as aircraft engine and automobile manufacturers.