Mixing enhancement of supersonic flow induced by splitter plate cavity

Abstract

Fast and efficient mixing of fuel and oxidizer in a RBCC combustor is crucial for the efficiency improvement of engine propulsion system. Whereas, the existence of compressibility effects of high-speed flow notably suppresses the mixing process. In present work, the strategy of splitter plate cavity is proposed to promote mixing. The influences of splitter plate cavity with different length to depth ratio (r) on mixing process are researched. Fine vortex structures are well captured and the newly found T-shaped structures and their evolution dynamics induced by the cavity instability are thoroughly analyzed. The results indicate that tremendous growth of the mixing layer in flow transition region is realized. For the dimensionless streamwise velocity distribution, the recognized appearance of multiple peaks at far flow field for splitter plate cavity with r=4 and 8 leads to great velocity gradient in local position, which can promote mixing process of upper and lower streams. The distributions of streamwise turbulence intensity, turbulent kinetic energy and transversely integrated turbulent kinetic energy suggest that vigorous dynamic behaviors of T-shaped structures can obviously increase local turbulence, especially for splitter plate cavity with r=8. The structure topology analysis results reveal that larger size of the evolutionary T-shaped structure and more intense rotation process of these structures can undoubtedly engulf more main stream into the mixing region to achieve mixing augmentation.