Prelude
In a meticulously planned but fairly quick turn of events, I have joined Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore as a Project Assistant in High Speed Turbulent Combustion & Spray Lab in Aerospace Engineering Dept. under the guidance of Prof. S. Chaudhuri. My tenure started from 10th May, 2019.
Research
Initial few days went into talking with the fellow students (PhD, M.Tech and current project assistants) about the projects in which they have been involved. This gave me a fair idea about the work going in this research field. Within the domain of this lab, I am more interested in aerospace propulsion systems, so I was particulary keen about the project that dealt with Scramjet engine.
After few days, I have been assigned to work with one of the PhD students. We are trying to understand the swirling turbulent flame interaction in land-based gas turbine engines through PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) and PLIF (Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence) imaging techniques. My work is to perform computation on the images obtained during the experiments and calculate certain key parameters (curvature, normals and strain rate) from it in MATLAB.
Understanding the right dynamics behind flame interaction in multi-swirler setup is crucial in the sense that precautionary steps could be taken in advance to prevent blow off. This is one of the key problems that results in huge monetary losses to both the suppliers and the consumers.
Introduction
Swirling flames are generally used in the combustor because of compactness, enhanced ignition efficiency and low Nox emission. We are considering a small section of the annular arrangement from CFM-56 Turbofan Engine with three swirlers for studying the flame interaction. Moreover, the swirlers are arranged in a linear fashion for experiments owning to an annular ring of large radius. This facilitates in emulating the environment in the lab.
The fuel used is simply methane (CH4) along with air for a lean premixed flow.