Introducing cavity flameholders into a solid-fuel ramjet fuel grain demonstrated increased fuel loading with sustained combustion in previously unfavorable geometries. Volumetric fuel loading improvements of up to 26% were demonstrated to sustain combustion. Regression patterns of cavity fuel grains are presented and show that the effect of implementing a cavity flameholder is to change the location of maximum regression and the reattachment point. The addition of a cavity flameholder does not appear to have a significant effect on combustion efficiency. However, it is noteworthy that longer cavities increased the chamber pressure above what was observed for a center-perforated fuel grains as a result of the increased mass addition and higher equivalence ratio associated with the higher regression rate. Large-eddy simulation computations were performed using a fourth-order discontinuous Galerkin finite element solver with a novel flamelet and progress variable formulation. The predictions agree well with the experiments and point to the increased heat transfer for longer cavities as the main flameholder mechanism. The larger heat feedback is supported by the formation of a stronger recirculation region, which leads to increased coherent fluctuations due to the transition between local and global instabilities.
Experiments are conducted to determine how acoustic perturbations affect the performance and flameholding of solid-fuel ramjets with nonstandard combustion chambers. The focus is on the effect of wall cavities carved in the fuel grain using additive manufacturing. An improved understanding of how the wall geometry contributes to the establishment of acoustic modes is sought. A novel combustion mechanism was developed using a counterflow burner to study the combustion and regression of solid model fuel polymethyl methacrylate. The diffusion flame between the fuel and oxidizer was studied numerically using a solid-fuel decomposition and melt layer model to simulate convection and pyrolysis of the material. This model was validated using new experimental data as well as previously published works. The foam layer parameters are critical to the success of the validation, showing that the increased residence time of the gas in the bubbles facilitates the fuel breakdown. Fourth-order computational simulations of ramjet combustion without regressing fuel walls using a novel discontinuous Galerkin approach are performed with a fully conjugate solution for the thermal wave in the solid. Turbulent transport strongly affects the heat feedback to the walls, and low-frequency vortical modes (e.g., with a vortical wavemaker) associated with a recirculation region at the injector upstream wall are linked to an increase in chamber pressure and fuel mass flux.
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