Exergetic and Thermal Performance Analysis of Liquid and Gaseous Fuel-Air Mixture in PDC Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Exergy is non-conserved quantities and associated with second law efficiency of a thermodynamic system. The exergy losses during combustion process play a vital role for pilot fuel economy. This study investigates the exergetic and thermal performance of liquid and gaseous fueled pulse detonation combustor at stoichiometric (phi = 1) fuel-air mixture. The mathematically formulated model and numerical simulations have been done through Ansys CFD Fluent platform to ascertain the impact of hydrogen and kerosene fuel-air mixture for exergetic performance of pulse detonation combustor. From the simulation, it is found that hydrogen-air and kerosene-air mixture has an exergetic efficiency of 53.19% and 23.43% in deflagration combustion process and 57.49% and 24.89% in detonation combustion process. The surface radiative efficiency of 23.32% is obtained from hydrogen-air detonation combustion, and it is higher than kerosene-air mixture. Exergetic efficiency of gaseous fuel-air mixture has higher compared to liquid fuel-air mixture for both deflagration and detonation combustion process. For the same fuel, utilization higher the combustion species temperature is attained from hydrogen-air mixture with zero emission.