Research of expendable turbojet tubular combustion chamber

Abstract

This paper presents research related to the tubular combustion chamber of an expendable turbojet. Although annular combustors are dominant at present, tubular combustors are still attractive because they are simpler to produce and require lower amounts of air flow for testing. The objective of this research was to assess the combustor’s primary zone configuration, and four configurations were tested to obtain experimental answers for use in future work. The configuration of the combustion chamber is a simple and classic design in line with its expendable purpose. The test methodology was to perform initial testing of the primary and secondary zones under atmospheric conditions using the four configurations, and then to subsequently complete the combustor using the best configuration. The complete combustor was then tested under both atmospheric conditions and working conditions. The results showed that the stability margin was wide enough to cover the combustor’s entire working area. The measured efficiency and pressure drop were in very good agreement with the corresponding designed values. The design and testing methodology proposed here could be used for similar scientific and engineering research applications.

Special Collection on advanced practices in aerospace and energy engineering

“…Experimental investigation of the turbulent swirl flow in a piping system, a highly complex transient, 3D flow, is presented in C ˇantrak and Jankovic´5 It was performed by PIV, a contemporary, noninvasive measuring technique, and it provides insight into the turbulence structure as well as abundant validation data. A special kind of turbomachinery, a jet engine, or more precisely, its core part is investigated in Davidovic´et al 6 Four different configurations of a tubular combustion chamber were experimentally tested to establish the range of its operability. The proposed design and experimental methodology can easily be applied to similar structures.…”