An Investigation of Contoured Wall Injectors for Hypervelocity Mixing Augmentation

A parametric study of a class of contoured wall fuel injectors is presented. The injectors were aimed at enabling shock-enhanced mixing for the supersonic combustion ramjet engines currently envisioned for applications on hypersonic vehicles. Short combustor residence time, a requirement for fuel injection parallel to the freestream, and strong sensitivity of overall vehicle performance to combustion efficiency motivated the investigation. Several salient parametric dependencies were investigated. Injector performance was evaluated in terms of mixing, losses, jet penetration and heating considerations. A large portion of the research involved a series of tests conducted at the NASA Langley High - Reynolds Number Mach 6 Wind-Tunnel. Helium was used as an injectant gas to simulate hydrogen fuel. The parameters investigated include injector spacing, boundary layer height, and injectant to freestream pressure and velocity ratios. Conclusions concerning injector performance and parameter dependencies are supported by extensive three-dimensional flow field surveys as well as data from a variety of flow visualization techniques including Rayleigh scattering, Schlieren, spark-shadowgraph, and surface oil flow. As an adjunct to these experiments, a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes solver was used to conduct a parametric study which closely tracked the experimental effort. The results of these investigations strongly complemented the experimental work. Use of the code also allowed research beyond the fairly rigid bounds of the experimental test matrix. These studies included both basic investigations of shock-enhanced mixing on generic injectors, and applied efforts such as combining film-cooling with the contoured wall injectors. Location of an oblique shock at the base of the injection plane was found to be a loss-effective method for enhancing hypervelocity mixing through baroclinic generation of vorticity and subsequent convection and diffusion. Injector performance was strongly dependent on the displacement effect of the hypersonic boundary layer which acted to modify the effective wall geometry. Strong dependence on injectant to freestream pressure ratio was also displayed. Mixing enhancement related to interaction of the unsteady component of the boundary layer with both steady and unsteady components of the flow field was found to be secondary, as were effects due to variation in mean shear between the injectant and the freestream in the exit plane.