The weight of the oxidizer dominates the take-off weight of rocket based propulsion systems. Therefore, airbreathing engines that consume the oxygen from the atmosphere offer a promising alternative. At flight conditions with Mach numbers above 6 SCramjet propulsion systems represent a better suited concept than ramjet systems, as the high static temperature resulting from the deceleration to s...

A sub-millimeter scale catalytic combustor was fabricated. Platinum catalyst coated on a porous ceramics support was placed in the combustion chamber. The chamber, sized 10 10 1:5 mm was covered with a GaAs window which is transparent to infrared radiation. The conversion rate was measured using gas chromatography. The temperature distribution in the combustion chamber was measured with an infr...

This two-part paper assesses four strategies for energy recovery from municipal solid waste (MSW) by dedicated waste-to-energy (WTE) plants generating electricity through a steam cycle. The feedstock is the residue after materials recovery (MR), assumed to be 35% by weight of the collected MSW. In strategy 1, the MR residue is fed directly to a grate combustor. In strategy 2, the MR residue is ...

Predictive modelling of turbulent combustion is important for the development of air-breathing engines, internal combustion engines, furnaces and for power generation. Significant advances in modelling non-reactive turbulent flows are now possible with the development of large eddy simulation (LES), in which the large energetic scales of the flow are resolved on the grid while modelling the eff...

Effective cooling of gas turbine combustor liners, combustor transition pieces, turbine vanes (nozzles) and blades (buckets) is a critical task to protect these components from the flue gas at extremely high temperature. Air film cooling has been successfully used to cool these hot sections for the last half century. However, the net benefits from the traditional methods seem to be marginally i...

A rather large computational effort is required for calculating the exact values of the spectral radiative extinction, absorption and scattering coefficients in pulverized coal combustors, which contain a polydispersed solid-gas mixture of reactants and combustion products (coal, char, fly ash and soot particles and gaseous components). This computation becomes an especially significant problem...

A combustion instability in a combustor typical of aero-engines is analyzed and modeled thanks to a low order Helmholtz solver. A Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) is first applied to the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) database. The mode with the highest amplitude shares the same frequency of oscillation as the experiment (approx. 350 Hz) and it shows the presence of large entropy spots generated w...

A wave rotor is proposed for use as a constant volume combustor. A novel design feature is investigated as a remedy for hot gas leakage, premature ignition, and pollutant emissions that are possible in this class of unsteady machines. The base geometry involves fuel injection partitions that allow stratification of fuel/oxidizer mixtures in the wave rotor channel radially, enabling pilot igniti...