Mixing improvement induced by the combination of a micro-ramp with an air porthole in the transverse gaseous injection flow field

Abstract

A new injection strategy combined with a micro-ramp and an air porthole is proposed in this paper, and the properties of the transverse gaseous injection flow field with such injection strategy have been investigated simultaneously. The numerical approach employed in the current study has been validated against the two-dimensional and three-dimensional experimental data in the open literature, and it can be used with confidence to investigate the influence of the air porthole aspect ratio and the distance between the air porthole and the fuel orifice on the transverse injection flow field with the combination of a micro-ramp and an air porthole. The obtained results predicted by the three-dimensional Reynolds-average Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations coupled with the two equation k-ω shear stress transport (SST) turbulence model show that the mixing performances of the transverse gaseous injection flow fields vary under different conditions, and a transverse injection flow field with short mixing length, low stagnation pressure loss and ideal fuel penetration depth has been achieved by adding the combination of an optimized micro-ramp with a proper air porthole, i.e. Case 6–8, and its mixing length decreases considerably by 14.26 mm on the basis of Case c, even shorter than the mixing length of Case a by 2.86 mm. However, its total pressure loss increases when compared with Case c, and its stagnation pressure loss is 2.7 percent smaller than Case a. Further, the hydrogen distribution on the flat plate of Case 6–8 is much less than that of Case a and Case b. Additionally, it is found that the mixing enhancement mechanism of the air jet is different from that of the micro-ramp. The micro-ramp enhances the mixing process between the fuel and air by inducing large-scale vortices, while the air porthole enhances the mixing process by seeding lots of air into the fuel boundary layer, as well as fuel plume.