Vorticity generation by contoured wall injectors

Abstract

A class of contoured wall fuel injectors was designed to enable shock-enhancement of hypervelocity mixing for supersonic combustion ramjet applications. Previous studies of these geometries left unresolved questions concerning the relative importance of various axial vorticity sources in mixing the injectant with the freestream. The present study is a numerical simulation of two generic fuel injectors which is aimed at elucidating the relative roles of axial vorticity sources including: baroclinic torque through shock-impingement, cross-stream shear, turning of boundary layer vorticity, shock curvature, and diffusive flux. Both the magnitude of the circulation, and the location of vorticity with respect to the mixing interface were considered. Baroclinic torque and cross-stream shear were found to be most important in convectively mixing the injectant with the freestream, with the former providing for deposition of vorticity directly on the fuel/air interface.