Research Projects

Supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) is one of the promising high-speed transport devices used owing to higher efficiency and larger thrust. There are numerous challenges in the design of combustion chamber since it involves supersonic and turbulent combustion which in itself is extremely difficult to sustain. Moreover, there are issues like proper mixing with fuel residence time of the order of microseconds. In this context, air throttling has emerged as a unique method to mitigate the issue with proper mixing and efficient combustion which modulates the inflow acting as a staller improving fuel air mixing. Furthermore, generation of pre-combustion shock waves generates conducive pressure and temperature assisting combustion especially for hydrocarbon fuels. At present, combustion efficiency is one of the major concerns which depends strongly on the fuel used in scramjet. Hydrocarbon fuels are preferred at Mach number operations (Ma = 8-10). In this context, feasibility of kerosene as low-cost fuel needs to be investigated more rigorously to find out its suitability, particularly in air throttled scramjet. Keeping in view of the complexity and expensive nature of experimentation in scramjet, the computational approach is well established which helps in preliminary investigations. For instance, the density-based solver of ANSYS FLUENT 19.2 is extensively used to compute the fluid flow and combustion characteristics. Accordingly, the present project aims to study the combustion behavior of scramjet using Kerosene as low cost fuel when it is air throttled for high Mach number operation. Numerical experiments would be useful to ascertain the regime of operation of scramjet using low cost fuel like Kerosene.