CFD aided development of an experimental setup to investigate internal supersonic combustion

The work presented here summarizes our efforts on the development of a simplified model scramjet combustor to investigate supersonic mixing and combustion in the Stanford Expansion Tube Facility. The system is designed to replicate the conditions and the flow features found in a generic scramjet engine of a hypersonic vehicle. The initial conceptual design was aided by two-dimensional numerical simulations which were targeted to identify possible working configurations, limits of operation and to isolate selected cases of interest. A configurable prototype was then developed, built and tested in our flow facility under realistic aerothermodynamic conditions of hypersonic flight. Finally, more detailed RANS numerical simulations of two representative scramjet model combustors have been undertaken. Besides identifying a suitable RANS solver for further investigations, the goal was to investigate the flowfield within the combustor and to identify the effective conditions of operations for future work.