Effect of variation of inlet boundary conditions on the combustion flow-field of a typical double cavity scramjet combustor

Abstract

The present research work deals with the numerical simulation of double cavity scramjet combustor by using two equation standard k-ε turbulence model and finite-rate/eddy-dissipation reaction models which is again coupled with Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations to investigate the influence of variation of inlet boundary condition of air as well as H2 fuel on the combustion flow-field of scramjet engine subsequently. At the same time, the validations of the current computational approach have been completed against a standard experimental data which is available in the literature. An acceptable similarity is observed between present numerical approach with the experimentally attained schlieren photograph and the pressure distribution curve. In the present work, 8 different cases are studied. Among them, first four cases are investigated for the variation of inlet boundary condition of air and the remaining four cases are studied for the variation of inlet boundary condition of H2 fuel. The obtained results show that the formation of high-pressure region around the cavities for case 3 and case 4 actually helps to push the greater amount of air to the cavity region where it is mixed with adequate amount of H2 for proper and stable combustion whereas for case 6, it is observed that most of the combustion phenomena closely fitted into a small space of the combustor and mainly occurs near the cavity region.