Numerical Study of Micron-Scale Aluminum Particle Combustion in an Afterburner Using Two-Way Coupling CFD–DEM Approach

Abstract

Metal additives have positive effects on the flow field such as increasing the temperature and thrust, while this may decrease local gaseous velocity due to inter-phase drag forces on the other hand. An in-house computational solver was developed to study the typical multiphase flow with combustion. The solver relies on Eulerian–Lagrangian model and the two-way coupling approach. Numerical simulations were carried out on an afterburning chamber of a solid-fuel ramjet to study the impact of using aluminum particles as metal additive. For micron-scale aluminum particles, the injection area, initial temperature, diameter and mass flow rate are varied influence factors, while the afterburning chamber and inlet primary high-temperature gases are fixed for all the test cases. It was found that better particle dispersion can result in higher combustion efficiency due to increasing the gas-particle contact area as well as better heat transfer and diffusion. Injecting aluminum particles with higher initial temperature and smaller diameter tend to get ignited faster and then burn more easily, which means releasing more heat in the length-limited flow field. However, the aluminum particle massflow rate has much more complicated comprehensive influence than the changing rules of the adiabatic combustion temperature based on the NASA CEA code.