Discharge and jet characteristics of gliding arc plasma igniter driven by pressure difference

Stable combustion in an afterburner can help increase the thrust of the engine in a short time,thereby improving the maneuverability of a fighter.To improve the ignition performance of an afterburner,a twin-duct ignition platform was designed to study the performance of a gliding arc plasma igniter in close-to-real afterburner conditions.The research was carried out by a combination of experiments and simulations.The working environment of the igniter was explored through a numerical simulation.The results showed that the airflow ejected from the radiating holes formed a swirling sheath,which increased the anti-interference ability of the airflow jet.The influence of the pressure difference between the inlet and outlet of the igniter(Δp),the flow rate outside the igniter outlet(W_(2)),and the installation angle(α)on the singlecycle discharge energy(E)as well as the maximum arc length(L)were studied through experiments.Three stages were identified:the airflow breakdown stage,the arc evolution stage,and the arc fracture stage.E and L increased by 107.3%and 366.2%,respectively,withΔp increasing from 10 to 70 Torr.The relationship between L andΔp obtained by data fitting is L=3-2.47/(1+(Δp/25)^(4)).The relationship of L at differentαis L_(α=0°)>(L_(α=45°)and L_(α=135°))>L_(α=180°)>L_(α=90°).E and L decrease by 18.2%and 37.3%,respectively,whenΔp=45 Torr and W_(2) is increased from 0 to 250 l min^(-1).

Experimental investigation on DBD plasma reforming hydrocarbon blends

To improve the‘detonation-supporting’performance of fuel-rich catalytic combustion products,DBD plasma,stimulated by adjustable nanosecond pulse power supply,was used to further regulate the components and concentrations of the hydrocarbon blends.In this paper,the parameters including load voltage,frequency,rising(falling)edge,pulse width and feeding flow rate were changed respectively,and the corresponding concentration and proportion change of the components in blend gas were investigated.According to the experiment result,it was found that when the discharge frequency is low,the plasma mainly promotes the transformation of light gaseous substances,while it mainly promotes the conversion to heavy hydrocarbons when the frequency is larger.Increasing load voltage will strengthen this trend.The controlling and reforming effect of plasma on the blend gas will decrease with the increase of voltage rising(falling)edge and the feeding flow rate.The regulation effect will be strengthened with the increase of pulse width under 200 ns.With the increase of discharge intensity,the‘carbon’settles on the walls of the reactor,which will change the dielectric constant,leading to the loss of control of the discharge.

Gliding arc plasma adjusting pre-combustion cracking products

In view of the difficulty of kerosene-air detonation faced by the application of rotating detonation to aviation engines,in order to improve the kerosene detonation activity,the atmospheric pressure gliding arc plasma is used to conduct secondary adjustment of the pre-combustion cracking products.The results show that the components with larger molecular weight in the pre-combustion cracking products,such as ethylene and methane,can be cracked into highly active species of hydrogen and acetylene by gliding arc plasma.With the increase of the fuel ratio of pre-combustion cracking,the plasma has a more significant effect on the adjustment of high active components.However,as the flow rate of the cracking gas treated by plasma increases,the adjustment effect is obviously reduced.

Experimental investigation on n-decane plasma cracking in an atmospheric-pressure argon environment

In order to solve the problem of the difficulty of igniting and steadily propagating a continuous rotating detonation engine when using liquid hydrocarbon fuel, an experiment was carried out using a dielectric barrier discharge excited by a nanosecond power supply to crack n-decane, the single alternative fuel to aviation kerosene, in a pre-heated argon environment.By changing the voltages and the discharge frequencies, the concentrations of different components as well as a number of different species were acquired.The generating mechanism of olefins and alkanes together with their competition mechanism were acquired.The influence of the voltage on isomer products was also analyzed.The results demonstrate that the bond energy distribution and the species generating condition are the main factors affecting the formation of the products.With the increasing of voltage and discharge frequency, small molecule olefins, large molecular olefins, large molecular alkanes, small molecular alkanes, and hydrogen were detected, and in turn, their concentrations were also increased except for ethylene;what is more, when the voltage was increased over 8.5 kV, the n-butene converted to trans-butene, and the n-pentene converted to isoamylene.

A self-similar solution of a curved shock wave and its time-dependent force variation for a starting flat plate airfoil in supersonic flow

The problem of aeroelasticity and maneuvering of command surface and gust wing interaction involves a starting flow period which can be seen as the flow of an airfoil attaining suddenly an angle of attack. In the linear or nonlinear case, compressive Mach or shock waves are generated on the windward side and expansive Mach or rarefaction waves are generated on the leeward side.On each side, these waves are composed of an oblique steady state wave, a vertically-moving onedimensional unsteady wave, and a secondary wave resulting from the interaction between the steady and unsteady ones. An analytical solution in the secondary wave has been obtained by Heaslet and Lomax in the linear case, and this linear solution has been borrowed to give an approximate solution by Bai and Wu for the nonlinear case. The structure of the secondary shock wave and the appearance of various force stages are two issues not yet considered in previous studies and has been studied in the present paper. A self-similar solution is obtained for the secondary shock wave,and the reason to have an initial force plateau as observed numerically is identified. Moreover, six theoretical characteristic time scales for pressure load variation are determined which explain the slope changes of the time-dependent force curve.

Subsonic impulsively starting flow at a high angle of attack with shock wave and vortex interaction

Impulsively starting flow, by a sudden attainment of a large angle of attack, has been well studied for incompressible and supersonic flows, but less studied for subsonic flow. Recently,a preliminary numerical study for subsonic starting flow at a high angle of attack displays an advance of stall around a Mach number of 0.5, when compared to other Mach numbers. To see what happens in this special case, we conduct here in this paper a further study for this case, to display and analyze the full flow structures. We find that for a Mach number around 0.5, a local supersonic flow region repeatedly splits and merges, and a pair of left-going and right-going unsteady shock waves are embedded inside the leading edge vortex once it is sufficiently grown up and detached from the leading edge. The flow evolution during the formation of shock waves is displayed in detail. The reason for the formation of these shock waves is explained here using the Laval nozzle flow theory. The existence of this shock pair inside the vortex, for a Mach number only close to 0.5, may help the growing of the trailing edge vortex responsible for the advance of stall observed previously.

Nonlinear uncertainty quantification of the impact of geometric variability on compressor performance using an adjoint method

Manufactured blades are inevitably different from their design intent,which leads to a deviation of the performance from the intended value.To quantify the associated performance uncertainty,many approaches have been developed.The traditional Monte Carlo method based on a Computational Fluid Dynamics solver(MC-CFD)for a three-dimensional compressor is prohibitively expensive.Existing alternatives to the MC-CFD,such as surrogate models and secondorder derivatives based on the adjoint method,can greatly reduce the computational cost.Nevertheless,they will encounter’the curse of dimensionality’except for the linear model based on the adjoint gradient(called MC-adj-linear).However,the MC-adj-linear model neglects the nonlinearity of the performance function.In this work,an improved method is proposed to circumvent the lowaccuracy problem of the MC-adj-linear without incurring the high cost of other alternative models.The method is applied to the study of the aerodynamic performance of an annular transonic compressor cascade,subject to prescribed geometric variability with industrial relevance.It is found that the proposed method achieves a significant accuracy improvement over the MC-adj-linear with low computational cost,showing the great potential for fast uncertainty quantification.

Mach reflection in steady supersonic flow considering wedge boundary-layer correction

Mach reflection in steady supersonic flow is an important phenomenon having received extensive studies,among which simplified theoretical models to predict the size of Mach stem and other flow structure are of particular interest.Past efforts for such models were based on inviscid assumption while in real cases the flow is viscous.Here in this paper we consider the influence of wedge boundary layer on the Mach stem height.This is done by including a simplified boundary layer model into a recently published inviscid model.In this viscous model,the wedge angle and the trailing edge height,which control the Mach stem height,are replaced by their equivalent ones accounting for the displacement effect of the wedge boundary layer,with the boundary layer assumed to be laminar or fully turbulent.This viscous model is shown to compare well with numerical results by computational fluid dynamics and gives a Mach stem height as function of the Reynolds number and Mach number.It is shown that due to the viscous effect,the Mach stem height is increased,through increasing the effective wedge angle.