Development of Phenomenological Liquid Spray Design Tool for Augmentor Operability and Performance

Injection of a liquid stream into a high-speed crossflow is applicable to many combustion applications including gas turbine augmentors. As a result, liquid stream injection has been studied extensively in recent years. Theses studies have resulted in some design tools directed at jet breakup length, jet penetration, and spray features. Despite these studies, however, wide variations in expressions describing even basic features, such as jet penetration, are apparent, reaffirming the lack of sufficient design tools. Currently, a comprehensive physics-based design code (i.e., computational fluid dynamics (CFD)) cannot deal with breakup, secondary atomization, and strong phase coupling. The most advanced codes with relatively quick turnaround require many assumptions and simplifications regarding the spray to be made, such as representing the spray with an average droplet size (e.g., Sauter Mean Diameter), and spherical particles. Hence, to provide an accurate description of the augmentor efficiency, light off, and stability, improvements in design tools are required. In particular, tools that provide characteristics associated with the spatial and temporal distribution of the fuel, evaporation, and mixing that can be applied efficiently are key. This proposal outlines a non-CFD based approach to ensure maximum usability and rapid turnaround.