Comprehensive analysis method of acquiring wall heat fluxes in rotating detonation combustors

Abstract

Accurate perception of the combustor thermal environment is crucial for thermal protection design of a rotating detonation combustor (RDC). In this study, a comprehensive analysis method is established to calculate the non-uniform heat flux distribution of the RDC by utilizing the measured temperature distribution of the combustor outer wall obtained by the high-speed infrared thermal imager. Firstly, a physical model based on the geometric characteristics of the RDC is constructed and its thermal conductive process is simulated, given by different heat flux boundary conditions. The analysis results indicate that the method used in current research for computing the heat flux of RDC leads to significant discrepancies, particularly in regions of obvious axial heat flux gradients near the top of the combustor. Then the Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M) method for inversely solving non-uniform heat flux is developed based on the two-dimensional heat conduction equation, and the wall heat fluxes are inversely calculated by the L-M method based on the above numerical data. Results show that the L-M method can obtain more accurate heat flux distribution even in the zones with large heat flux gradients, considering the axial heat conduction within the combustor outer wall caused by the non-uniform heat flux. Finally, the wall heat flux distribution is analyzed coupling the L-M method together with the experimental measurements in kerosene two-phase RDC. The analyses show that the wall heat flux exhibits non-uniform distributions both circumferentially and axially, with axial non-uniformity being particularly pronounced. The highest temperature of combustor outer surface and the highest wall heat flux occurs within the region of 20 mm from the combustor head, which corresponds to nearly 14 % of the combustor length. The heat flux peak and thermal heat rate are positively correlated with the combustor equivalence ratio in the range between 0.44 and 0.64. In this study, the distribution of wall temperature field in the two-phase RDC is obtained for the first time and the wall heat flux is calculated inversely by L-M method. This work provides a more accurate method for calculating heat flux in RDC and offers references for thermal protection designs in RDCs.