Experimental investigation of the flow-spray field in a realistic concentric staged high-temperature-rise combustor

Abstract

The present work investigated the flow and spray fields in a realistic concentric staged high-temperature-rise (HTR) combustor in isothermal conditions using high-speed (10 kHz) particle image velocimetry (PIV) and 10 Hz kerosene planar laser-induced fluorescence (kerosene-PLIF). The two stages of the combustor, including a pilot stage and a main stage, were operated both individually and jointly to investigate their corresponding flow fields and the interactions between the flow from the two stages. From the time-averaged flow field results, strong coupling between the pilot and main swirling flows has been identified, leading to the formation of a primary recirculation zone (PRZ) and a lip recirculation zone (LRZ). From the instantaneous flow fields, the presence of a precessing vortex core (PVC) was observed when the two stages were flowing jointly, and the dominant PVC unsteady motions located in the inner shear layer of the pilot swirling was identified using snapshot proper orthogonal decomposition (snapshot POD) with dominant frequencies at 1400 and 1515.4 Hz. Comparing the flow field with the spray field indicates that the unsteady flow motion, in addition to the mean bulk flow, plays a key role in the understanding of the spray distribution. Noticeably, it is shown in present study that the dominant unsteady flow motions properly captured from the POD analyses show good agreement with some primary features of the spray distribution, which can be valuable to unraveling the complex flow-spray coupling in the HTR combustor operated under realistic conditions.