The impact of representative inlet conditions on low-emission fuel injector performance

Environmental pollution has been a major point of interest in recent years, and aerospace gas turbine combustion systems must address increasingly more stringent emissions requirements. One potential way of addressing these requirements is the introduction of lean burn combustion technology. However, lean burn fuel injectors are much larger, relative to traditional rich burn injectors. This leads to increased aerodynamic interactions with upstream and downstream components and a highly non-uniform feed to the injector. The impact of this on the combustion process is currently not well understood. Importantly, these effects are not accounted for in typical test facilities used for injector development, as these are generally plenum fed. Hence, the main aim of this work is to study the impact of these aerodynamic interactions on the combustion process in order to obtain the true embedded performance of a lean burn injector and hence improve future low emission fuel injector designs. Using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), validated by particle image velocimetry (PIV), a modified inlet was designed which could be retro fitted into a single sector plenum fed reacting flow facility as typically used in injector development programme. [Continues.]