41st Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit AIAA 2003-338

6-9 January 2003, Reno, Nevada

A Study on Effective Heat Transfer Characteristics in an Afterburner With

Ceramic Stabilizer

Yumin Xiao R.S. Amano

CFD Research Corporation Department of Mechanical Engineering
215 Wynn Dr., Suite 501 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Huntsville, AL 35805, USA Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

ABSTRACT I average turbulence intensity

A new kind of stabilizer—ceramic kf rate coefficient
stabilizer—is applied in the afterburner of an
k conductivity of mixture
aero-engine. In contrast to a traditional
K number of mixtures
stabilizer, fuel can be supplied from its
md mass of droplet
ceramic surface, so a more stable
performance can be expected from the flame L length scale
behind the stabilizer. A pressure-based, M molecular weight
unstructured grid solver is developed by Md molecular weight of droplet
CFD Research Corporation. An evaporation •
model for fuel droplets is developed to m mass generation rate
predict the evaporation rate. Numerical Nu Nusselt number
simulations concerning flow and heat p pressure
transfer are conducted to predict the spray psat saturation pressure
evaporation, and the chemical reactions in Pr Prandtl number
the fuel in the after burner. The focus of this QL evaporation latent heat
paper is the stability improvement from this •
new kind of ceramic stabilizer. q heat transfer rate
Re Reynolds number
NOMENCLATURE Sh Sherwood number
Sc Schmidt number
A pre-exponential constant T temperature
Ad front area of droplet Td temperature of droplet
B drag force
Bm Spalding number U velocity vector
CF quadratic drag factor
v velocity vector of droplet
CD drag coefficient Y mass fraction
Cp specific heat
D diameter of droplet turbulence energy dissipation rate
E/R activation energy porosity of medium
g gravity density

1
Copyright © 2003 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.
 shear stress
µ viscosity
permeability
m mass diffusion coefficient
•
reaction rate
1. INTRODUCTION
Afterburners are widely used in the aero-
engines of fighter planes to increase thrust
and flexibility. The stabilizer, an important
part of the afterburner, is designed to
produce a stable flame in the burner as an
igniter for the high-speed gas-fuel mixture
flow. To produce a stable flame, the
traditional stabilizer takes advantage of only
the recirculation zone behind it. This is a
passive control method, which constrains its
efficiency. In an active control method, we
should be able to control the combustion
behind the stabilizer by controlling the mass
fraction distribution of fuel in this region.
Based on this idea, this paper proposes a
new kind of ceramic stabilizer is proposed in
the present paper.
In contrast to the traditional stabilizer, the
ceramic stabilizer makes use of the
capillarity of ceramic material to provide
additional fuel supply from the stabilizer
surface. The supplied fuel can be controlled
by the porosity of the ceramic material and
the pressure difference through the ceramic
material. Therefore, this new kind of
stabilizer may be considered to be an active
control stabilizer.
The fuel evaporated from the ceramic
surface is trapped into a recirculation zone
behind the stabilizer, resulting in a chemical
reaction. High temperatures are expected to
exist in this region, which will greatly
improve the combustion stability.
2
The following sections present numerical
simulations that were conducted to predict
the flow and heat transfer in the afterburner.
2. NUMERICAL METHOD
The approach in this study is to perform
two-dimensional axi-symmetric calculation
in an afterburner combustor. An advanced
CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics)
software based on the unstructured grid is
used to perform the computations, in which
a density-based, finite volume method is
employed. The SIMPLEC1 scheme is
adopted in this CFD code to discrete the
governing equations.
The standard k- model2 is applied to
calculate the turbulence. The standard k-
model is a high Reynolds model and is not
valid in the near-wall regions where viscous
effects dominate the effects of turbulence.
Instead, “wall functions” are used in cells
adjacent to walls. In the present calculation,
an improved near wall treatment method3 is
employed to deal with that region.
2.1 Flow Simulation in Porous Media
In the present calculations, the ceramic
material is considered to be a porous media,
through which transport is governed by the
conservation equations of mass, momentum,
and energy. Chemical reaction is ignored in
the porous media. As the pore dimensions
may often be in the sub-micron range, their
overall effect is represented through
volume-averaged quantities (the porosity, ,
and the permeability, ). The volume-
averaged conservation equations, mass and
momentum, are as follows4, 5:
Mass conservation is given by the equation
( )+ •( U) = 0 (1)
t
 The conservation equation for momentum C µ3 / 4 k 3 / 2
within the porous regions may be written as: = (4)
L

( U)+ •( U U) = p+ •( )+ where I and L are the average turbulence

t intensity and length scale, respectively. In
this paper, I is set to be 0.01, and L is set to
be 0.1 times the characteristic dimension of
2
µ 3
CF the domain (porous media).
B U UU (2)
2.3 Fuel Ejection
The fuel is ejected from two 50
where the porosity of the medium micrometer injectors with a random velocity
represents the volume occupied by the pores magnitude of 20~40 m/s and a random half-
to the total volume of the porous solid, while cone-angle of 0-30o. Discrete
the permeability, , is a quantity rep- droplet/particle parcels are tracked through
resenting the surface area to volume ratio of the computational domain by solving the
the porous matrix. The last two terms in Lagrangian conservation equations. Each
equation (2) represent an additional drag parcel represents a number of identical
force imposed by the pore walls on the fluid droplet/particles. For steady state
within the pores, and usually results in a calculations, a parcel is tracked through its
significant pressure drop across the porous lifetime (until it evaporates completely).
solid. In a purely fluid region, 1 and The momentum equation for the droplet
, and the standard Navier-Stokes can be written as:
equation is recovered. In terms of boundary
conditions, no special treatment of the r r
dv r r r A
momentum and pressure correction md = C D (U v )U v d + md g (5)
dt 2
equations is required at fluid-porous solid
interfaces.
For a spherical droplet,
2.2 Turbulence in Porous Media D3
md = d (6)
The standard k- model6 is employed to 6
simulate the turbulence kinetic energy and
dissipation rate. As we all know, turbulence D2
is not very important in porous media, but it Ad = (7)
4
is vital to calculate the flow in contiguous
regions bounding the porous media. So far
where D denotes the droplet diameter.
there is no appropriate modification method
As the droplet moves through the
for the turbulence calculation in porous
surrounding medium, it absorbs heat from
media. The present paper introduces
the mixture and evaporates. The rate of
algebraic functions to calculate the
evaporation is modeled as:
turbulence kinetic energy k and dissipation
rate : •
m=2 D m Sh * ln(1 + B m ) (8)
3 r2
k = I2U (3)
2 where m represents the diffusion coefficient
of the mixture.

3
 The Spalding mass transfer number Bm
can be calculated from where k is the thermal conductivity of the
mixture. The Nusselt number, Nu, is
Y Yi obtained from the following correlation7
Bm = (9)
1 Y 0.276 Re0.5 Pr 0.333
Nu = 1 + (15)
1.232
(1 + ) 0.5
0.5 1.333
Sh = 1 + 0.3 Re 0.5 Sc 0.333 (10) Re Pr

where Y is mass fraction at the droplet The procedure for droplet calculation can
be summarized as follows:
surface and it can be calculated from the
saturation pressure, psat as:
1. Do the heat transfer calculation [equation
(14)];
1
Y = (11) 2. Calculate the evaporation rate of the
p M droplet [equation (8)];
1+ 1
psat Md 3. Solve the droplet temperature [equation
(13)];
where M and Md represent the molecular 4. Find a new psat from new Td , then
weight of the gas and the droplet, obtain a new Y ; repeat steps (1)~(3);
respectively. 5. Solve the momentum equation [equation
D3 (5)];
Since md = d , the mass 6. Update droplet properties.
6
conservation equation for the droplet can be
rewritten in terms of its diameter:
2.4 Chemical Reaction
d 4 ln(1 + B m ) In the present calculations, the fuel is
D= m (12) C12 H 23 , a standard aviation fuel called Jet-
dt dD
A, and the following single step reaction is
The energy equation for the droplet is conducted:
written as
C12 H 23 +17.75O2÷12 CO2 +11.5 H 2O (16)
dTd • •
md C p = D 2 q + m evp QL (13) The Finite-Rate Model is applied to solve
dt
the chemical reaction in fuel combustion, in
•
which a single reaction step can be specified
where QL represents the latent heat, m evp the to proceed at a finite-rate. This model is
evaporation mass flow rate for each droplet, restricted to two reactant species. The mass
• fraction of fuel is calculated by the solution
and q is the heat transfer between the of a transport equation with a source term
droplet and the surrounding mixtures, which due to chemical reaction for the finite-rate
can be calculated as8 model.
The rate coefficients are assumed to have
• an Arrhenius form9:
2k (T Td ) Nu ln(1 + Bm )
q= (14)
DBm

4
 E species other than fuel are not solved, but
k f = AT n e RT (17) can be calculated from the mixture fractions
and the mass fraction of fuel.
For the above-mentioned reaction, we
have:
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
+10 3
A = 2.9e kg-moles/ m ,
n=0 The dimension of the combustion
E/R=15000 chamber model is 0.5m in diameter, while
the dimension of the stabilizer is 0.14m in
The rate of the reaction is expressed as: diameter. Figure 1 shows the geometry of
the model combustor. The inlet boundary
conditions are:
[ ] [YO ]17.5
•
= k f YC12 H 23 2
(18)
Gas mixture:
P = 620000 Pa
In order to reduce the number of variables V = 100 m/s
to be solved, the mixture fraction method is T = 1000K
applied to solve the chemical reaction. A
CO2 = 12%
mixture is defined as a combination of
species with a fixed composition. For O2 = 14%
example, a mixture designated “air” may N 2 = 70%
have a composition of 23.2% O2 and 76.8% H 2O = 4%
N 2 by mass, whereas a mixture designated Initial Conditions of Fuel:
“fuel” may have a composition of 100% T = 330K
C12 H 23 . Each mixture is tracked with a P = 700000 Pa (for stabilizer)
mixture fraction variable, which is governed Porous Media
by the general transport equation: = 1%
= 10
Yj
( Yj) + ( uiY j ) = ( )
t xi xi xi

• •
Mj j + ( m j ) evp (19)

Note that this equation contains two

source terms: one due to the chemical Figure 1 Geometry of model combustor.
reaction, and the other due to the
evaporation of spray droplets. The diffusion
coefficient is the same for all mixture
fractions.
Since the mixture fractions sum to unity,
K-1 mixture fraction transport equations will
be solved when K mixtures are defined.
Transport equations for mass fractions of

5

(a)
(b)
Figure 2 Grid distributions.
Figure 2(a) shows the grid distributions in
the computation domain. Unstructured
triangle mesh is generated in regions around
the stabilizer, while structured quadrilaterals
are employed in the nozzle and other regions
(see figure 2(b)). The total number of nodes
is 6023.
Figure 3 shows the velocity vectors in the
combustion chamber. No fuel emerges from
the ceramic surface in this case. Right
behind the stabilizer there exists a large
recirculation zone, which will produce a
constant high temperature source during the
firing process. Figure 4 shows the details of
the velocity vectors around the stabilizer.
The distinct border between the recirculation
zone and the downstream flow represents a
“dead zone,” and the heat and mass transfer
across the border occurs mainly by
diffusion, not by convection. Figure 5 shows
the Mach number distributions in the
chamber. The maximum Mach number
reaches 2.35 at the exit, which shows that
the present software CFD has the capability
6
to handle incompressible compressible,
subsonic supersonic flow calculation.
Figure 3 Velocity Vectors (no fuel supply
from the stabilizer).
Figure 4 Details of Velocity Vectors around
the stabilizer.
Figure 5 Mach number distributions.
Figures 6(a)-(b) show the fuel ejection
from injectors and the trajectories of liquid
droplets in the model combustor. The
difference between these two figures is that
the positions of the injectors are different.
The y positions in (b) are 0.02m lower than
those in (a). From these figures the
following can be concluded: the lifetime of
liquid droplets (with size of 50µm) is about
0.002s; as the velocity of the main flow is
very high, it is difficult for droplets to spray
in vertical direction, which means that the
mixing of the fuel vapor and the gas mixture
is dominated by turbulent diffusion.
Therefore it is difficult to trap fuel from the
main flow into the recirculation zone.
Figures 7 (a)-(b) show the corresponding
mass fraction distribution of C12 H 23 . It can
be seen that the mass fraction downstream
from the stabilizer is very low, which means
that there will be no chemical reactions in
this region or that the temperature is not
high enough to sustain a stable flame.
Figures 8 (a)-(b) show the temperature (a)
distributions in the chamber. The highest
temperature reaches 2087K in both cases.
We can see that the temperature in the
region near the symmetric axis is higher in
Fig. 8(b) than in Fig. 8(a) because of the
heat and mass transfer in convection. The
region right behind the stabilizer, as we
mentioned before is a “dead zone” in which
the temperature does not change too much.
(b)

Figure 7 Mass fraction distributions of

C12 H 23 .

(a)

(a)

(b)

Figure 6 Fuel ejection and droplet

trajectories.

(b)

Figure 8 Temperature distributions.

7
 Figure 9 shows the distribution of
turbulence kinetic energy. The region of
high kinetic energy occurs in the wall
boundary layer in the divergent section of
nozzle. While in the throat of the nozzle, the
flow experiences a subsonic transonic
supersonic transition, creating a
relatively high kinetic energy region, which
will improve the mixing in the nozzle and
result in high thrust efficiency.
Figure 9 Distribution of kinetic energy.
In the following cases, 0.5% of the fuel is
supplied from the ceramic stabilizer surface.
Figure 10 shows the velocity vectors
around the ceramic stabilizer. In contrast to
figure 4, the 0.5% fuel supply creates a
larger recirculation zone. It seems that the
fuel vapor from the ceramic surface pushes
the recirculation center a little bit
downstream while the fuel ejection from the
injectors does not affect the mass fraction
distribution in the recirculation zone.
Figure 10 Velocity vectors with ceramic
stabilizer.
8
Figure 11 shows the mass fraction
distribution of C12 H 23 in the chamber. In
contrast to figure 7(b), the mass fraction in
the region right behind the stabilizer is very
high. As this is a “dead zone”, the fuel vapor
from the ceramic surface is fully trapped,
producing a high temperature zone because
an exothermic reaction will take place in it.
Figure 11 Mass fraction distribution of
C12 H 23 with ceramic stabilizer.
Figure 12 shows the temperature
distributions in the chamber. As we have
noticed in figure 11, a high temperature zone
is expected behind the stabilizer. We can see
that the highest temperature occurs in the
region around the symmetric axis behind the
stabilizer. In contrast to figure 8(b), this
situation will provide a more stable flame
with a higher temperature in the combustor.
Figure 12 Temperature distribution with
ceramic stabilizer (K).
CONCLUSIONS
Through this study the following
conclusions emerge:
(1) The proposed computation model can
be applied to analyze the flow and heat
transfer in the combustion chamber of
an afterburner.
(2) The ceramic stabilizer is an active
control stabilizer. In contrast to the
traditional one, the ceramic stabilizer
can produce a larger reculation zone
and provide a stable, constant high
temperature zone behind it, which
would greatly improve the combustion
stability in the afterburner.
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