High Fidelity Simulation of Two-phase Flow and Combustion in Aero-engine Combustor

Abstract

Spray combustion is widely used in advanced propulsion and power systems such as aircraft engines, gas turbines, rocket engines, and internal combustion engines, and has important military applications and industrial needs. The essential characteristics of spray combustion in engines are the multiphase, multiscale, and multiphysical coupling processes between liquid fuel atomization, turbulence, phase change, and chemical reactions. These couplings directly determine the efficiency, pollutant emissions, and stability of propulsion and power systems. The complex multiphysical coupling process also brings great challenges to the study of spray combustion. On the one hand, modern measurement technology finds it very difficult to measure real conditions of high temperature and high pressure in engines, and corresponding data is limited to typical working conditions. On the other hand, the accuracy and efficiency of existing commercial software and open-source code in dealing with complex multiphase turbulent combustion processes in practical problems are very limited, which greatly limits the application of numerical methods in spray combustion. The content of this research is a series of works done by the reporter in the past ten years in developing high-fidelity, full-scale numerical methods for spray combustion, revealing the multiphysical coupling mechanism of turbulent atomisation processes, developing two-phase combustion models, and application research on actual aeroengine combustion chambers, along with some reflections.

Speaker

Prof. Changxiao Shao is currently a Professor at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). He graduated with a PhD from Zhejiang University in 2017 and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University. Prof. Shao has focused on key issues related to spray combustion in the field of aero-engines. His work includes developing high-fidelity two-phase interface capturing method and coupling algorithms with combustion, revealing the multi-scale and multi-physics coupling mechanism of turbulent atomization processes, and developing two-phase combustion models with its application in actual aeroengine combustion chambers. Prof. Shao has published many papers in reputable journals such as Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, Journal of Computational Physics, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, and Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Additionally, he has led projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and has received several accolades, such as Young Outstanding Talents in Guangdong Province and Overseas High-Caliber Personnel in Shenzhen.