Simulations on Optimization of Liquid Spray Burners & Operating Parameters

<p>Spray burners form an essential part of any liquid propulsion system as they are responsible for injecting, atomizing, mixing and combusting the liquid fuel. Spray combustion used in aerospace applications like the liquid rocket engines, gas turbines or any other controlled environment for that matter places a huge emphasis on safe and effective operations. These applications make use of relatively small amounts of propellant volumes to generate enormous amounts of energy through combustion for producing thrust. For such cases involving enormous energy interactions, combustion comes with its own set of challenges. The predominant challenge among them all is that of combustion instability. Instabilities are physical phenomena occurring in both reacting and non-reacting flows. In the context of combustion, they tend to emanate from very small perturbations in the flow field and amplify in magnitude to alter the macroscopic properties of the flow causing problems for the smooth functioning of engines. Since the problem of combustion instability arises from the point of injection of the fuel itself, an optimal characterization of the spray burner performance based on combustion stability is mandatory for the effective working of the engine in use. The role of spray burners in combustion stability is an aspect yet to be comprehensively analyzed owing to the heterogeneous heat and mass transfer and thus the present work focuses on the combustion characteristics of spray burners and is motivated by the need to have stable and efficient engine performance.</p>