Numerical Simulation of Injection and Mixing on New Power Systems of Liquid-Fueled Pulse Detonation Engines

Pulse detonation engines (PDE) have received significant attention in recent years due to their potential advantages over conventional propulsion systems, including high thermodynamics cycle efficiency, high thrust/weight and specific impulse. The fuel-air injection and mixing is one of important research issues. To optimize the fuel-air injection and mixing, a three-dimensional computation model of PDE is established. The mixing process for twin-fluid air-assisted atomizers for air supplied with tangential inlet and axial inlet is numerically analyzed by using the software Fluent as platform to solve the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations, and the relationship between drop size and air mass and gasoline/air ratio is arrived at. Numeric simulations results of the process with different inlets show that well mixing but bad concentration distribution occurs with tangential inlet especially along the central axis which makes PDE difficult to work in high frequency, while bad mixing but well-proportioned distribution occurs through axial inlet. And with the same gasoline/air ratio initialized, as the air mass increases, the droplet size decreases, and the result is also correct for the case in which the gasoline/air ratio decreases with the same air mass initialized. These results are found to be in good agreement with the limited experimental data that is currently available. The conclusions are available for the design of liquid-fueled PDE.