Planar Fuel and Air Nozzle Arrays Produced with a Laminated Structure

This project's objective is to develop a low-cost fuel nozzle structure that creates a fuel spray which originates from a rectangular or circular array of fuel and air nozzles. The resulting fuel spray will apear tooriginate from a two-dimensional source, in contrast to the presently used fuel sprayers which produce a cone-shaped spray that appears to originate from a point source. Spatially distributing the fuel and air sources improves the speed at which the air and fuel mix. The entire nozzle plate will be formed by stacking sheets of metal (.001" to .010" thick) and bonding them by diffusion welding. The structural layers, which contain the fuel and air supply passages and comprise the bulk of the nozzle plate, can be thick and coarsely cut by photofabrication techniques using chemical resist and etchant. The nozzle layers, which form the fuel and air jets, can be made from a precision nickel-copper bimetal process, by EDM, or from carefully etched stainless steel. In the preferred configuration, the fuel channels are supplied from the edge of the laminated structure and the air is supplied from the back.