Numerical simulation of angular injection of hydrogen fuel in scramjet combustor

Abstract

Angular injection of hydrogen fuel in a scramjet combustor is explored numerically. Three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations with turbulence and combustion models are solved using commercial computational fluid dynamics software. Both infinitely fast kinetics and single-step finite rate H₂–air kinetics are used to find out the effect of chemical kinetics in the thermochemical behaviour of the flow field. Grid independence of the results is demonstrated and gridconvergence index-based error estimate provided. k-ω turbulence model performs better, in comparison to k–ϵ and shear stress transport models, in predicting the surface pressure. Single-step finite rate chemistry (SSC) performs extremely well in predicting the flow features in the combustor. Computed temperature and species mole fraction and wall pressure distributions with SSC match better with the experimental results compared to fast chemistry calculation and detailed chemistry calculation of other workers. It has been observed that simple chemistry can describe H₂–air reaction in scramjet combustor reasonably well.