Combustion Database for Kerosene Fuels

The Air Force needs a better understanding of liquid fuel combustion to develop hypersonic aircraft which can rapidly deliver militarily important payloads to distant places. The Air Force also requires the development of multiple fuels to lower the risk associated with a supply interruption for any particular fuel. To facilitate these missions, detailed experimental studies of liquid fuel combustion are needed. Our innovation is to combine recently-developed, widely-tunable mid-IR laser sources with shock tube facilities at Stanford University having enhanced capabilities (longer test times and amenability to liquid injection) to develop a data base of combustion properties (including ignition times and species concentrations) over a wide range of conditions relevant to the combustion of candidate jet fuels. The Phase I program will prove the feasibility of this approach by demonstrating a shock tube with longer test times and using it to measure species concentrations and ignition times under conditions relevant to Air Force applications. A detailed measurement campaign, designed to produce a data base for researchers in the field, will then be conducted in Phase II.