Performance evaluation and parametric analysis on cantilevered ramp injector in supersonic flows

Abstract

The cantilevered ramp injector is one of the most promising candidates for the mixing enhancement between the fuel and the supersonic air, and its parametric analysis has drawn an increasing attention of researchers. The flow field characteristics and the drag force of the cantilevered ramp injector in the supersonic flow with the freestream Mach number 2.0 have been investigated numerically, and the predicted injectant mole fraction and static pressure profiles have been compared with the available experimental data in the open literature. At the same time, the grid independency analysis has been performed by using the coarse, the moderate and the refined grid scales, and the influence of the turbulence model on the flow field of the cantilevered ramp injector has been carried on as well. Further, the effects of the swept angle, the ramp angle and the length of the step on the performance of the cantilevered ramp injector have been discussed subsequently. The obtained results show that the grid scale has only a slight impact on the flow field of the cantilevered ramp injector except in the region near the fuel injector, and the predicted results show reasonable agreement with the experimental data. Additionally, the turbulence model makes a slight difference to the numerical results, and the results obtained by the RNG k−ε and SST k−ω turbulence models are almost the same. The swept angle and the ramp angle have the same impact on the performance of the cantilevered ramp injector, and the kidney-shaped plume is formed with shorter distance with the increase of the swept and ramp angles. At the same time, the shape of the injectant mole fraction contour at X/H=6 goes through a transition from a peach-shaped plume to a kidney-shaped plume, and the cantilevered ramp injector with larger swept and ramp angles has the higher mixing efficiency and the larger drag force. The length of the step has only a slight impact on the drag force performance of the cantilevered ramp injector. However, it makes a difference to the flow field in the vicinity of the fuel injector, and the subsonic region becomes narrower with the increase of the length of the step.