Experimental and computational study on combustion performance of a kerosene fueled dual-mode scramjet engine

Dual-mode scramjet has a good thrust performance in the wide range of flight Mach number. The effect of equivalence ratio and fuel distribution on combustion performance of the dual-mode scramjet engine was investigated by numerical simulations and experiments in this paper. The results were obtained under the inflow condition with Mach number of 2.0, total temperature of 1100 K, and total pressure of 1.0 MPa. When the total equivalence ratio was 0.6, there were large differences in combustion performance of different fuel distribution cases, the combustion performance was better when kerosene was injected in front of the first cavity (defined as K1), the position of thermal throat was different in each case. When the total equivalence ratio was 0.8, there were little differences in combustion performance of the same fuel distribution cases, but the position of thermal throat was at the same location. The position of thermal throat was also at the same location when the equivalence ratio of K1 was increased, the size of separation zone in the isolator was increasing. The flow structure of this dual-mode scramjet was stable when the combustion mode was subsonic combustion. The thrust increased as the total equivalence ratio was increased.