Combustion instability analysis in an ethylene-fueled scramjet combustor under various fuel penetration height conditions using an image-based nonlinear dimensionality reduction method

The present study investigates the effects of fuel penetration height on combustion instabilities in an ethylene-fueled scramjet model combustor with a cavity flameholder. Experiments were performed at the stagnation temperature of 1900 K, the stagnation pressure of 0.37 MPa, and the Mach number of 2. Three fuel injection orifice diameters:2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 mm, were tested to elucidate the effects of ethylene penetration height on combustion instabilities. Furthermore, high-speed measurements of CH* chemiluminescence and shadowgraphs were performed with high-speed video cameras. To examine the dynamics of the combustion instabilities, time-resolved CH* chemiluminescence images and shock parameters, extracted from snapshots of shadowgraphs, were analyzed using a non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm: Gaussian Process Dynamical Model (GPDM). Thereafter, further analyses on the acquired latent variables were conducted with Recurrence Plot (RP). The experimental results showed that the fuel equivalence ratio (ϕ) range for cavity shear-layer combustion mode expanded as d decreased. Furthermore, for ϕ = 0.18, the instability behavior remarkably changed at around = 2.4 mm. Therefore, the instability dynamics for ϕ = 0.18 were investigated using GPDM and RP including results from our previous study ( = 2, 3, and 4 mm), revealing differences in the instability behaviors. For = 3 and 4 mm, jet-wake combustion and ram combustion modes were established alternately with a frequency of about 1600 Hz. In contrast, at = 2.4 and 2.5 mm, although a similar instability in the = 4 mm case was present at almost the same oscillation frequency, a different instability behavior was also confirmed. This additional instability exhibited an intermediate state between jet-wake combustion and ram combustion modes. These two instabilities emerged aperiodically. For an unstable combustion in shear layer observed for = 2 and 2.3 mm, corresponding RPs exhibited black patches, indicating that the oscillation amplitude diminished substantially.