Computational modeling of high pressure combustion mechanism in scram accelerator

Abstract
A computational study was carried out to analyze a high-pressure combustion in scram accelerator. Fluid dynamic modeling was based on RANS equations for reactive flows, which were solved in a fully coupled manner using a fully implicit-upwind TVD scheme. For the accurate simulation of high-pressure combustion in ram accelerator, 9-species, 25-step fully detailed reaction mechanism was incorporated with the existing CFD code previously used for the ram accelerator studies. The mechanism is based on GRI-Mech. 2.11 that includes pressure-dependent reaction rate formulations indispensable for the correct prediction of induction time in high-pressure environment. A real gas equation of state was also included to account for molecular interactions and real gas effects of high-pressure gases. The present combustion modeling is compared with previous 8-step and 19-step mechanisms with ideal gas assumption. The result shows that mixture ignition characteristics are very sensitive to the combustion mechanisms, and different mechanism results in different reactive flow-field characteristics that have a significant relevance to the operation mode and the performance of scram accelerator.