On flames established with air jet in cross flow of fuel-rich combustion products

• Modeled inverse diffusion flames in fuel-rich combustion products.
• Reacting flow associated with jet-in-cross-flow environment is simulated using a detailed chemical kinetics.
• Predicted the unusual flame movement when the blowing ratio or equivalence ratio was increased.
• Hydrogen in the cracked fuel products causes non-intuitive flame behavior due to preferential diffusion.

Advances in combustor technologies are driving aircraft gas turbine engines to operate at higher pressures, temperatures and equivalence ratios. A viable approach for protecting the combustor from the high-temperature environment is to inject air through the holes drilled on the surfaces. However, it is possible that the air intended for cooling purposes may react with fuel-rich combustion products and may increase heat flux. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has developed an experimental rig for studying the flames formed between the injected cold air and the cross flow of combustion products. Laser-based OH measurements revealed an upstream shift for the flames when the air injection velocity was increased and downstream shift when the fuel content in the cross flow was increased. As conventional understanding of the flame stability does not explain such shifts in flame anchoring location, a time-dependent, detailed-chemistry computational-fluid-dynamics model is used for identifying the mechanisms that are responsible. Combustion of propane fuel with air is modeled using a chemical-kinetics mechanism involving 52 species and 544 reactions. Calculations reveled that the flames in the film-cooling experiment are formed through autoignition process. Simulations have reproduced the various flame characteristics observed in the experiments. Numerical results are used for explaining the non-intuitive shifts in flame anchoring location to the changes in blowing ratio and equivalence ratio. The higher diffusive mass transfer rate of hydrogen in comparison to the local heat transport enhances H2–O2 mixing compared to thermal dissipation rate, which, in turn, affects the autoignition process. While increasing the blowing ratio abates the differences resulting from non-equal mass and heat transport rates, higher concentrations of hydrogen in the fuel-rich cross flows accelerate those differences.