Experimental Investigation of the Flow Field and the Heat Transfer on a Scaled Cooled Combustor Liner With Realistic Swirling Flow Generated by a Lean-Burn Injection System

Abstract

Lean-burn swirl stabilized combustors represent the key technology to reduce NOx emissions in modern aircraft engines. The high amount of air admitted through a lean-burn injection system is characterized by very complex flow structures, such as recirculations, vortex breakdown, and processing vortex core, which may deeply interact in the near wall region of the combustor liner. This interaction and its effects on the local cooling performance make the design of the cooling systems very challenging, accounting for the design and commission of new test rigs for detailed analysis. The main purpose of the present work is the characterization of the flow field and the wall heat transfer due to the interaction of a swirling flow coming out from real geometry injectors and a slot cooling system which generates film cooling in the first part of the combustor liner. The experimental setup consists of a nonreactive three sector planar rig in an open loop wind tunnel; the rig, developed within the EU project Low Emissions Core-Engine Technologies (LEMCOTEC), includes three swirlers, whose scaled geometry reproduces the real geometry of an Avio Aero partially evaporated and rapid mixing (PERM) injector technology, and a simple cooling scheme made up of a slot injection, reproducing the exhaust dome cooling mass flow. Test were carried out imposing realistic combustor operating conditions, especially in terms of reduced mass flow rate and pressure drop across the swirlers. The flow field is investigated by means of particle image velocimetry (PIV), while the measurement of the heat transfer coefficient is performed through thermochromic liquid crystals (TLCs) steady state technique. PIV results show the behavior of flow field generated by the injectors, their mutual interaction, and the impact of the swirled main flow on the stability of the slot film cooling. TLC measurements, reported in terms of detailed 2D heat transfer coefficient maps, highlight the impact of the swirled flow and slot film cooling on wall heat transfer.