UC Irvine

This paper summarizes NASA-supported experimental and computational results on the mixing of a row of jets with a contract subsonic crossflow in a cylindrical duct. The studies from which these results were excerpted investigated flow and geometric variations typical of the complex 3-D flowfield in the combustion chambers in gas turbine engines. The principal observations were that the momentum-flux ratio and the number of orifices were significant variables. let penetration was critical, and jet penetration decreased as either the number of orifices increased or the momentum-flux ratio decreased. It also appeared that jet penetration remained similar with variations in orifice size, shape, spacing, and momentum-flux ratio when the number of orifices was proportional to the square-root of the momentum-flux ratio. In the cylindrical geometry, planar variances are very sensitive to events in the nearwall region, so planar averages must be considered in context with the distributions. The mass-flow ratios and orifices investigated were often very large (mass-flow ratio >1 and ratio of orifice area-to-mainstream cross-sectional area up to 0.5), and the axial planes of interest were sometimes near the orifice trailing edge. Three-dimensional flow was a key part of efficient mixing and was observed for all configurations. The results shown also seem to indicate that non-reacting dimensionless scalar profiles can emulate the reacting flow equivalence ratio distribution reasonably well. The results cited suggest that further study may not necessarily lead to a universal "rule of thumb" for mixer design for lowest emissions, because optimization will likely require an assessment for a specific application.