Effect of hardware geometry on gas and drop behavior in a radial mixer spray

Abstract

The demands on current and future aero gas turbine combustors are requiring a greater insight into the role of the injector/done design and manufacturing tolerances. This paper systematically isolates manufacturing tolerances and focuses on hardware design. The target is the structure of the two-phase flow and combustion performance associated with practical injector/dome hardware. A spray injector with two radial inflow swirlers was custom designed to (1) maintain tight tolerances and strict assembly protocol and (2) thereby isolate the sensitivity of performance to hardware design. Although it represents practical hardware, the custom set is a unique modular design that (1) accommodates parametric variation in geometry, (2) retains symmetry, and (3) maintains effective area. Swirl sense and the presence of a venturi were found to be the most influential. The venturi acts as a fuel prefilming surface and constrains the highest fuel mass concentration to an annular ring near the centerline. Coswirl enhances the radial dispersion of the continuous phase, and counterswirl increases the level of mixing that occurs in the downstream region of the mixer. The combined effect of the two parameters (swirl sense and venturi) revealed that the largest drop sizes, which penetrate the continuous phase flow, are formed with coswirl and without venturi. The smallest drop size distributions were found to occur for the counterswirl configuration with venturi. In the case of counterswirl without venturi, the high concentration of fluid mass is found in the center region of the flow. The lean blowout (LBO) equivalence ratio was lower for counterswirl configurations for reasons that involved the coupling of the centerline recirculation zone with the location of high fuel concentration emanating from smaller droplets. In the coswirl configuration, a lack of fuel drops exists in the reaction anchoring region, thereby leading to poor stability characteristics.