UC Irvine

The current work focuses on the jet-in-crossflow penetration and dispersion behavior of water-in-oil emulsions in a high pressure environment. Both fuel injection strategies of using a water-in-oil emulsion and a jet-in-crossflow have demonstrated unique benefits in improving gas turbine performance from an emissions and efficiency standpoint. A jet-in-crossflow is very practical for use in gas turbine engines, rocket propulsion, and aircraft engines since it utilizes already available crossflow air to atomize fuel. Injecting water into a combustion chamber in the form of a water-in-oil emulsion allows for pollutant emissions reduction while reducing efficiency loses that may result from using a separate water or steam injection circuit. Dispersion effects on oil droplets are expected, therefore investigating the distribution of both oil and water droplets in the crossflow is an objective in this work. Understanding the synchronization and injection behavior of the two strategies is of key interest due to their combined benefits. A water-to-oil ratio and an ambient pressure parameter are developed for emulsion jet-in-crossflow trajectories. To this end, a total of 24 emulsion jet-in-crossflow tests were performed with varying ambient pressures of 2-8 atm and momentum flux ratios of 50, 85, and 120. Sobel edge filtering was applied to each averaged image obtained from a high speed video of each test case. Averaged and filtered images were used to resolve top and bottom edges of the trajectory in addition to the overall peak intensity up to 40 mm downstream of the injection point. An optimized correlation was established and found to differ from literature based correlations obtained under atmospheric pressure conditions. Overall it was found that additional parameters were not necessary for the top edge and peak intensity correlations, but a need for a unique emulsion bottom edge and width trajectory correlation was recognized. In addition to investigating emulsion jet-in-crossflow trajectory correlations, a unique Dual Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (Dual-PLIF) method was applied for the first time on emulsions at elevated pressure conditions. From the Dual-PLIF results, qualitative observations provided insight into the unique dispersion of oil and water concentrations within a cross-sectional plane down stream of the jet-in-crossflow injection.