Acoustics in Flameholding Solid-Fuel-Ramjet Fuel Grains

Abstract

Experiments are conducted to determine how acoustic perturbations affect the performance and flameholding of solid-fuel ramjets with nonstandard combustion chambers. The focus is on the effect of wall cavities carved in the fuel grain using additive manufacturing. An improved understanding of how the wall geometry contributes to the establishment of acoustic modes is sought. A novel combustion mechanism was developed using a counterflow burner to study the combustion and regression of solid model fuel polymethyl methacrylate. The diffusion flame between the fuel and oxidizer was studied numerically using a solid-fuel decomposition and melt layer model to simulate convection and pyrolysis of the material. This model was validated using new experimental data as well as previously published works. The foam layer parameters are critical to the success of the validation, showing that the increased residence time of the gas in the bubbles facilitates the fuel breakdown. Fourth-order computational simulations of ramjet combustion without regressing fuel walls using a novel discontinuous Galerkin approach are performed with a fully conjugate solution for the thermal wave in the solid. Turbulent transport strongly affects the heat feedback to the walls, and low-frequency vortical modes (e.g., with a vortical wavemaker) associated with a recirculation region at the injector upstream wall are linked to an increase in chamber pressure and fuel mass flux.