High-speed imaging and stereoscopic particle-image velocimetry for turbulent combustion and explosion research

不断上涨的能源成本和对碳排放的担忧是下个世纪社会必须面临的两个关键挑战。应对这些挑战的一个有希望的解决方案是在发电和航空应用的燃气轮机发动机(GTE)中使用替代燃料。我们的团队与劳斯莱斯加拿大公司(RRC)合作，为发电应用中的GTE开发替代气体燃料，并与普惠加拿大公司合作开发生物喷气和喷气燃料的混合物。为了验证和改进用于模拟使用替代燃料的GTE内部燃烧的设计工具，我们正在研究一系列层流和湍流火焰，这些火焰在一系列尺度上建立了对子模型的信心。这项工作正在扩展到正在进行的项目中与发动机相关的压力，在这些项目中，我们正在建设一个具有光学诊断通道的高压火焰设施。拟议的高速立体PIV系统建立在使用以前的CFI和RTI资金创建的实验室基础设施之上，将使湍流火焰实验中的三维流场得以解决，提供更好的验证数据，并减少我们工业合作伙伴由此产生的设计工具的不确定性。除了为我们的发动机相关燃烧实验启用这一重要的诊断功能外，高速摄像机还将支持金属燃烧领域的几个项目。长期以来，金属粉末一直被用作炸药和推进剂中的含能添加剂，我们的团队对此有着深厚的研究历史，现在正在考虑将其用作可回收的可再生能源载体，作为氢经济或电池的替代概念，有望获得更高的功率密度和更低的成本。我们小组在微重力条件下这类粉末中的火焰传播以及在现场试验中的大规模火焰和爆炸方面的工作在加拿大是独一无二的，在这一领域的国际研究中处于领先地位。该设备还将支持在受限磁化目标聚变反应堆中发生的流体动力不稳定性的工作。获得这里建议的高速成像和立体声PIV硬件和软件对这些不同的研究计划至关重要。

Rising energy costs and concerns over carbon emissions are two key challenges that society must face in the next century. One promising solution to these challenges is the use of alternative fuels in gas-turbine engines (GTE) for power generation and aviation applications. Our group works with Rolls Royce Canada (RRC) on alternative gaseous fuels for GTE used in power-generation applications and with Pratt & Whitney Canada on mixtures of biojet and jet fuels. In order to validate and improve the design tools used to model the combustion inside of these GTEs with alternative fuels, we are studying a range of laminar and turbulent flames that build confidence in the submodels over a range of scales. This work is being extended to engine-relevant pressures in ongoing projects in which we are building a high-pressure flame facility with optical diagnostic access. The proposed high-speed stereoscopic PIV system builds off of a laboratory infrastructure created using previous CFI and RTI funding and will enable the three-dimensional flowfield in the turbulent flame experiments to be resolved, providing improved validation data and reduced uncertainty in the resulting design tools of our industrial partners. In addition to enabling this important diagnostic capability for our engine-relevant combustion experiments, the high-speed cameras will also support several projects in the area of metal combustion. Metal powders have long been used as energetic additives in explosives and propellants, which our group has a strong history of studying, and are now being considered for their potential use as recyclable carriers of renewable energy in an alternative concept to the hydrogen economy or batteries that promises higher power densities and lower costs. Our group's work on the propagation of flames in such powders under micro-gravity conditions and in large-scale flames and explosions in field trials are unique within Canada and at the leading edge of international research in this area. The equipment will also support work on hydrodynamic instabilities occuring in confined magnetized target fusion reactors. Access to the high-speed imaging and stereo-PIV hardware and software proposed here are critical to these diverse research programs.