Combustor test assembly

The combustor test assembly, shown in Figure 7, was comprised of ... 

The fuel and air mixture leaves the vaporizer and is fed to the combustor assembly, which consists of a diffuser, plenum with flow conditioning, nozzle, and combustor test section. The diffuser transits the flow from a 50.8-millimeter circular duct to a 160 X 120 mm rectangular-shaped plenum. The flow conditioning consists of two perforated plates, which enhance the flow uniformity and serve as effective flame arresters. The two-dimensional nozzle is constructed from sectors of a large-radius pipe and has an area ratio of 6 1. Pitot probe surveys showed that this setup produced a uniform top-hat velocity distribution across the area of the nozzle exit [2],... 

For testing, the Mod 2 burner is housed within a heavily walled pressure vessel which also serves as a plenum chamber for the preheated inlet air supply. See Ref. 16 for a description of the test facility. The burner assembly is shown schematically in Figure 2 and is designed to use 100% of the air flow in the combustion process. Thus, air film cooling and air dilution which are normally used in an engine combustor are omitted. In this way, combustion effects from air injection are avoided for the concept evaluation. The cylindrical combustion chamber is water cooled, as are the sonic exhaust nozzle and gas sample probe. 

The test rig employed in this study consisted of a high-pressure cylindrical steel vessel with a length of 1.8 m and an internal diameter of 0.28 m (see Chap. 2). Visual inspection and accessibility of the reactor assembly was achieved via a 50 mm diameter quartz window at the rear flange of the vessel and two 350 mm long and 50 mm high quartz windows at the vessel sides. Experiments were performed in two different reactors. The first reactor was the optically accessible, channel-flow reactor presented in Sect. 2.1 therein, the use of in situ laser diagnostics (Sect. 2.2) allowed for the assessment of the catalytic reactivity of propane on platinum. The second reactor was a honeycomb subscale unit of the desired catalytic combustor (see Sect. 2.3), and was used for the evaluation of combustor performance characteristics. 

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