Characterization of a Heated Liquid Jet in Crossflow

The liquid jet in crossflow (LJICF) is a widely utilized fuel injection method for airbreathing propulsion devices such as low NO x gas turbine combustors, turbojet afterburners, scramjet/ramjet engines, and rotating detonation engines (RDE\u27s). This flow field allows for efficient fuel-air mixing as aerodynamic forces from the crossflow augment atomization. Additionally, increases in the thermal demands of advanced aeroengines necessitates the use of fuel as a primary coolant. The resulting higher fuel temperatures can cause flash atomization of the liquid fuel as it is injected into a crossflow, potentially leading to a large reduction in the jet penetration. While many experimental works have characterized the overall atomization process of a room temperature liquid jet in an ambient temperature and pressure crossflow, the aggressive conditions associated with flash atomization especially in an air crossflow with elevated temperatures and pressures have been less studied in the community. A successful test campaign was conducted to study the effects of fuel temperature on a liquid jet injected transversely into a steady air crossflow at ambient as well as elevated temperature and pressure conditions. Modifications were made to an existing optically accessible rig, and a new fuel injector was designed for this study. Backlit imaging was utilized to record changes in the overall spray characteristics and jet trajectory as fuel temperature and crossflow conditioners were adjusted. Three primary analysis techniques were applied to the heated LJICF data: linear regression of detected edges to determine trajectory correlations, exploratory study of pixel intensity variations both temporally as well as spatially, and modal decomposition of the data. The overall objectives of this study was to assess the trajectory, breakup, and mixing of the LJICF undery varying jet and crossflow conditions, develop a trajectory correlation to predict changes in jet penetration due to fuel temperature increases, and characterize the changes in underlying physics in the LJICF flow field. Based on visual inspection, the increase in fuel temperature leads to a finer and denser fuel spray. With increasingly elevated liquid temperatures, the penetration of the jet typically decreases. At or near flashing conditions, the jet had a tendency to penetrate upstream before bending over in the crossflow as well as experiences a rapid expansion causing the jet column to increase in width. Two trajectory correlations were determined, one for each set of crossflow conditions, based on normalized axial distance, normalized liquid viscosity, and normalized jet diameter as liquid is vaporized. The pixel intensity analysis showed that the highest temperature jet in the ambient temperature and pressure crossflow exhibited periodic behavior that was also found using various modal techniques including proper orthogonal decomposition and dynamic mode decomposition. Dominant frequencies determined for most test cases were associated with the bulk or flapping motion of the jet. Most notably, the DMD analysis in this study was successful in identifying robust modes across different subgroupings of the data even though the modes identified were not the highest power modes in each DMD spectrum