Improved Iodine Injection, Mixing and Pressure Recovery

The primary objective of CU Aerospace's Phase I work will be to investigate innovative iodine injection concepts for the chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) that improve mixing at higher total pressures. The designs will be made to significantly improve the pressure recovery of COIL systems while retaining efficiency. The results of the Phase I research will lay the foundation for developing a highly advanced COIL iodine injection scheme for improved pressure recovery in Phase II. Our team partner the University of New Mexico will assist CU Aerospace to perform cold flow PLIF experiments to examine the mixing character of the flow of a candidate method for injecting iodine. Design computations to investigate optimal injection configurations for gain magnitude and distribution, and chemical efficiency, will also be performed. This research will lead directly to designs that will be fabricated and tested extensively with detailed diagnostics to evaluate each design's performance attributes in Phase II with a goal of 250 Torr pressure recovery within the COIL cavity while maintaining flow uniformity both in species mixture and density. Use of the well-calibrated and economical COIL facility at the University of Illinois will allow these advanced concepts to be implemented and examined in detail.