All issues

When a supersonic air flow interacts with a transverse secondary jet injected into this flow through an orifice on a flat wall, a special flow structure is formed. This flow takes place during fuel injection into combustion chambers of supersonic aircraft engines; therefore, in recent years, various approaches to intensifying gas mixing in this type of flow have been proposed and studied in several countries. The approach proposed in this work implies using spark discharges for pulsed heating of the gas and generating the instabilities in the shear layer at the boundary of the secondary jet. Using simulation in the software package FlowVision 3.13, the characteristics of this flow were obtained in the absence and presence of pulsed-periodic local heat release on the wall on the windward side of the injector opening. A comparison was made of local characteristics at different periodicities of pulsed heating (corresponding to the values of the Strouhal number 0.25 and 0.31). It is shown that pulsed heating can stimulate the formation of perturbations in the shear layer at the jet boundary. For the case of the absence of heating and for two modes of pulsed heating, the values of an integral criterion for mixing efficiency were calculated. It is shown that pulsed heating can lead both to a decrease in the average mixing efficiency and to its increase (up to 9% in the considered heating mode). The calculation method used (unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier – Stokes equations with a modified $k-\varepsilon$ turbulence model) was validated by considering a typical case of the secondary transverse jet interaction with a supersonic flow, which was studied by several independent research groups and well documented in the literature. The grid convergence was shown for the simulation of this typical case in FlowVision. A quantitative comparison was made of the results obtained from FlowVision calculations with experimental data and calculations in other programs. The results of this study can be useful for specialists dealing with the problems of gas mixing and combustion in a supersonic flow, as well as the development of engines for supersonic aviation.

The paper presents the results of numerical simulation of the effect of a long spark discharge on the mixing dynamics of an injected gas jet with supersonic air flow. The calculations were performed using the CFD software package FlowVision. The fuel was supplied using an injector located on the channel wall, and the discharge was organized near the wall downstream of the injector. Simulation of electrical spark discharge was performed using a volumetric heat source. In order to describe the principal specifications of a plasma actuator to accelerate mixing in a supersonic flow (Mach number M = 2), the research involved varying the energy impact to the discharge in the range of 100–500 mJ per pulse, determining the influence of the shape and location of the discharge. A study of the fuel injection modes in a supersonic air flow has been carried out and an optimal gas jet outflow regime has been found to study the effect of a spark discharge. A method has been developed for analyzing the disturbance pattern of the fuel-oxidant interface caused by the operation of a pulsed spark discharge. A program was prepared in the LabView software environment for obtaining quantitative characteristics for further comparison with the results obtained in the experiment.

The simulation results allow us to conclude that the long spark discharge located along the flow downstream of the injector provides the maximum increase in the interface between the jet of fuel and the main flow. A typical repetition frequency of discharge pulses in a pulse-periodic mode should be more than 6 kHz with a discharge length of ~10 mm to ensure a continuous effect on the mixing at a flow velocity of 500 m/s.

Despite numerous achievements of modern science the problem of lightning initiation in an electrodeless thundercloud, the maximum electric field strength inside which is approximately an order of magnitude lower than the dielectric strength of air, remains unsolved. Although there is no doubt that discharge activity begins with the appearance of positive streamers, which can develop under approximately half the threshold electric field as compared to negative ones, it remains unexplored how cold weakly conducting streamer systems unite in a joint hot well-conducting leader channel capable of self-propagation due to effective polarization in a relatively small external field. In this study, we present a self-organizing transport model which is applied to the case of electric discharge tree formation in a thundercloud. So, the model is aimed at numerical simulation of the initial stage of lightning discharge development. Among the innovative features of the model are the absence of grid spacing, high spatiotemporal resolution, and consideration of temporal evolution of electrical parameters of transport channels. The model takes into account the widely known asymmetry between threshold fields needed for positive and negative streamers development. In our model, the resulting well-conducting leader channel forms due to collective effect of combining the currents of tens of thousands of interacting streamer channels each of which initially has negligible conductivity and temperature that does not differ from the ambient one. The model bipolar tree is a directed graph (it has both positive and negative parts). It has morphological and electrodynamic characteristics which are intermediate between laboratory long spark and developed lightning. The model has universal character which allows to use it in other tasks related to the study of transport (in the broad sense of the word) networks.

The influence of the process of initiating a rapid local heat release near surface streamlined by supersonic gas (air) flow on the separation region that occurs during a fast turn of the flow was investigated. This surface consists of two planes that form obtuse angle when crossing, so that when flowing around the formed surface, the supersonic gas flow turns by a positive angle, which forms an oblique shock wave that interacts with the boundary layer and causes flow separation. Rapid local heating of the gas above the streamlined surface simulates long spark discharge of submicrosecond duration that crosses the flow. The gas heated in the discharge zone interacts with the separation region. The flow can be considered two-dimensional, so the numerical simulation is carried out in a two-dimensional formulation. Numerical simulation was carried out for laminar regime of flow using the sonicFoam solver of the OpenFOAM software package.

The paper describes a method for constructing a two-dimensional computational grid using hexagonal cells. A study of grid convergence has been carried out. A technique is given for setting the initial profiles of the flow parameters at the entrance to the computational domain, which makes it possible to reduce the computation time by reducing the number of computational cells. A method for non-stationary simulation of the process of rapid local heating of a gas is described, which consists in superimposing additional fields of increased pressure and temperature values calculated from the amount of energy deposited in oncoming supersonic gas flow on the corresponding fields of values obtained in the stationary case. The parameters of the energy input into the flow corresponding to the parameters of the electric discharge process, as well as the parameters of the oncoming flow, are close to the experimental values.

During analyzing numerical simulation data it was found that the initiation of rapid local heating leads to the appearance of a gas-dynamic perturbation (a quasi-cylindrical shock wave and an unsteady swirling flow), which, when interacting with the separation region, leads to a displacement of the separation point downstream. The paper considers the question of the influence of the energy spent on local heating of the gas, and of the position on the streamlined surface of the place of heating relative to the separation point, on the value of its maximum displacement.