Behaviors of the reacting flowfield during the spontaneous formation of ramjet mode under a supersonic inflow

Abstract

This work experimentally studied the formation process of the ramjet mode occurring in a cavity-based combustor operating at a high-enthalpy supersonic flow. The ramjet mode is featured by the phenomenon that the incoming supersonic inflow is decelerated to be subsonic before it enters the combustor, which is caused by the strong heat release under a high equivalence ratio. In the experiments, the ignition is performed after a steady fuel mass flow rate has been achieved. According to the flame behavior and the flowfield structure, the formation process of the ramjet mode can be divided into three stages, among which stage 1 (from ignition to the cavity shear-layer mode) is shortest, while stage 3 (from the lifted shear-layer mode to the ramjet mode) consumes the longest time. In stage 2, flashback occurs and shock–shock interactions are found to be strongly coupled with the local combustion which have an influence on the propagation velocity of the backpressure. A thickening boundary layer upstream of the separation shock is observed when the separation shock has interwoven with the jet-induced bow-shock. The thickening process could be extremely short (in 100 μs) before the thickened boundary layer separates, during which the propagation velocity of the backpressure can be apparently decelerated. The same phenomena shown in the supplementary experiments confirm that the thickening boundary layer and its deceleration effect on the propagation of the backpressure are not accidental but more likely to be inherent to the flashback occurring under a supersonic flow.