An experimental study on the combustion characteristics of the cavity-stabilized supersonic premixed flame

With the overwhelming trend of fast and economic aviation, it is becoming increasingly difficult for fuel to burn stably and efficiently in a constrained space and time period in the combustor of a hypersonic air-breathing vehicle. Conventional supersonic diffusion flame runs the risk of blowing out in the incoming flow at such high velocity. Upstream fuel injection of the flame holder is gaining popularity due to its prominent advantage in improving mixing efficiency, and this fuel injection method contributes to the organization of supersonic premixed combustion. In order to study the combustion characteristics of the supersonic premixed flame, corresponding experiments are carried out on a direct-connected scramjet platform with the inflow total temperature of 1700 K and the inflow Mach Number of 2.0. Gaseous ethylene with an equivalence ratio of 0.15 was injected transversely 670 mm upstream of a cavity. Optical measurements including laser-induced fluorescence on the hydroxyl radical (OH-LIF), CH*chemiluminescence photography, and high-speed photography were performed to investigate the steady-state and transient combustion characteristics of the cavity-stabilized supersonic premixed flame. From steady-state OH-LIF and CH* results, the flame could be divided into reactant zone, preheating zone, intense reacting zone, and product zone. It could be inferred that the preheating zone induced by the hot product in the cavity acts as a radical source and heat source for combustion stabilization in the cavity. In addition, the transient flame morphology analysis was carried out from the high-speed photography results. The flame base position and flame spreading angle were abstracted from the binarized image. The results showed that there existed a subtle flame flashback phenomenon for the flame base, whereas the flame spreading angle maintained a relatively constant value with a small deviation. The frequency-domain analysis revealed that both the flame base position and flame spreading angle reached the peak amplitude in the direct current component (0 Hz), exhibiting no explicit high-amplitude resonance component within 1500 Hz compared to those in the diffusion combustion mode. In all, the supersonic premixed flame presented a stabilized flame morphology.