Numerical Simulation of the Exit Temperature Pattern of an Aircraft Engine Using a Temperature-Dependent Turbulent Schmidt Number

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a numerical simulation for predicting the combustor exit temperature pattern of an aircraft engine, developed using the commercial fluid simulation software Ansys Fluent, which assumes a shape probability density function for the instantaneous chemistry in the conserved scalar combustion model and the standard k-ε model for turbulence. We found the compliance of the radial and circumferential non-uniformities of the exit temperature with the experimental data to be insufficient. To achieve much more accurate result, the mixing intensity was enhanced with respect to the initial calculation due to using the reduced value of the turbulent Schmidt number Sc. Numerical simulation was performed for values of the turbulent Schmidt number from Sc = 0.85 (default) up to Sc = 0.2, with results confirming the reduction of radial and circumferential non-uniformities of exit temperature. However, correlation between radial and circumferential non-uniformities is not admissible for these cases. Therefore, we propose to use a temperature-dependent formulation of the turbulent Schmidt number Sc, accounting for the increase in Sc number with increasing gas temperature. A user defined function (UDF) was used to implement the Sc number temperature dependence in Ansys Fluent. The numerical results for the proposed Schmidt number Sc temperature dependence were found to be in acceptable agreement with the experimental data both for radial and circumferential non-uniformities of the exit temperature pattern.