Assessment of the modified rotation/curvature correction SST turbulence model for simulating swirling reacting unsteady flows in a solid-fuel ramjet engine

The present paper presents an assessment of the performance of the modified curvature-correction shear stress transport turbulence model (SST-CCM) proposed by Omer Musa et al. (2016) [12], for simulating swirling reacting unsteady flow in a solid-fuel ramjet engine. Results are compared to both the original SST and rotation-curvature SST (SST-RC) turbulence models. First, a numerical model has been developed to solve axisymmetric unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations of the turbulent swirling compressible flow field with chemical reactions. Second, in order to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the code, experiment on the solid-fuel ramjet without swirl has been performed and simulation on Shock-induced combustion benchmark case is carried out as well. Finally, unsteady simulations are carried out for reacting turbulent flows in a solid-fuel ramjet using Polyethylene (PE) solid fuel with three different turbulence models. It is found that in terms of accuracy for simulating reacting swirling flows the modified model slightly improves the original SST model and is quite similar to the SST-RC.