Dynamics and mixing mechanism of transverse jet injection into a supersonic combustor with cavity flameholder

The interaction between sonic transverse jet and supersonic crossflow coupled with a cavity flameholder is investigated using large eddy simulation (LES), where the compressible flow dynamics and fuel mixing mechanism are analyzed emphatically. An adaptive central-upwind 6th-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO-CU6) scheme along with multi-threaded and multi-process MPI/OpenMP parallel is adopted to improve the accuracy and parallel efficiency of the solver. This simulation aims to reproduce the flow conditions in the experiment, and the results show fairly good agreement with the experimental data for distributions of streamwise and normal velocity components. Instantaneous structures such as the shock, large scale vortices and recirculation zone are identified, and their spatial deformation and temporal evolution are presented to reveal the effect on the subsequent mixing. Then some time-averaged and statistical results are obtained to explain the interesting phenomenon observed in the experiment, that there are two pairs of counter-rotating streamwise vortices existing in and above the cavity with the same rotation direction. The above pair is induced by the transverse momentum of jet in supersonic crossflow, which is so-called counter-rotating vortices (CRVs) in the flat-plate injection. On account of the entrainment, the reflux in the cavity transports to the core of jet wakes, and then another pair of counter-rotating streamwise vortices is formed below with the effect of cavity. A pair of trailing CRVs is generated at the trailing edge of cavity, and the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) here is obviously higher than that in other regions. To some extent, the cavity can enhance the mixing, but will not bring excess total pressure loss.