Scramjet Combustor Simulations using Reduced Chemical Kinetics for Practical Fuels

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is playing an increasingly important role in U.S. industry. In the aerospace industry, where the cost of construction and operation of sub-scale and prototype units increases significantly with the increase in size andspeed of aircraft, CFD plays an important role as an adjunct to experimentation in reducing the costs of testing and scale-up and the time to take the product to market. To date, CFD codes have incorporated only very simplified descriptions of thechemistry. In many cases, this is not sufficient, and more detailed representations of the chemistry must be used. Within the proposed Phase II program, we will be integrating technology in several key areas to develop a capability for CFD modeling ofscramjet combustion that has not, as yet, been fully realized for practical application. The key technologies include state-of-the-art detailed mechanisms for aviation fuels, an automated procedure for detailed mechanism reduction, a 3-D turbulentreactive flow code for simulation of high-speed combusting flows, novel tabulation procedures to improve the computational efficiency of CFD simulations, and PDF techniques to account for turbulence-chemistry interactions.