DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF A STAGED COMBUSTOR FEATURING A PREMIXED TRANSVERSE REACTING FUEL JET INJECTED INTO A VITIATED CONFINED CROSSFLOW

Combustion phenomena are complex in theory and expensive to test, analysis techniques
provide handles with which we may describe them. Just as simultaneous experimental tech-
niques provide complementary descriptions of flame behavior, one might assume that no
analysis technique for any kind of flame measurement would cover the full description of
the flame. To this end, the search continues for complementary descriptions of engineering
flames that capture enough information for the engine designer to make informed decisions.
The kinds of flames I have encountered are high pressure transverse jet flames issuing into a
vitiated crossflow which is itself generated from combustion of a gaseous fuel and oxidizer.
Summarizing the behavior of these flames has required my understanding of experimen-
tal techniques such as Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence of a reaction intermediate -OH,
Particle Image Velocimetry of a passive tracer in the flame and OH * chemiluminescence of
another reaction intermediate. The analysis tools applied to these measurements must reveal
as much information as is laden in these measurements.
In this work I have also used wavelet optical flow to track flow features in the visualization
of combustion intermediates using OH * chemiluminescence. There are many limitations to
the application of this technique to engineering flames especially due to the interpretation
of the data as a 2-D motion field in 3-D world. The interpretation of such motion fields
as generated by scalar fields is one subject matter discussed in this dissertation. Some
inferences from the topology of the ensuing velocity field has provided insight to the behavior
of reacting turbulent flows which appear attached to an injector in the mean field. It gives
some understanding to the robustness of the attachment mechanism when such flames are
located near walls.